Praise for Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry takes on what few contemporary poets are willing to: the ways and hows of human existence, in both personal and historical terms. Tonally and technically, she has a wide range, being capable of writing touchingly intimate love poems on the one hand and treating natural objects with scientific precision on the other. The common denominator is the sensibility of a poet for whom all human perceptions, whether of inner experience or external things, turn into metaphor; that is to say, a language of meaning through connection.

—Lisel Mueller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize 

I know of no other contemporary poet who has quite her gifts. Hers is a poetry of deep intellectual as well as emotional commitment, and this fact is insurance that her poetry will endure when so much unfocused effusion has collapsed into deserving dust. Hers is a passionate intellection, and she embodies it in a bright tough music no one else matches or even approaches. 

—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina