some pure thing, / Some living source, half-imagined and half-real, / Pulses in the fictive water that I feel. - John Montague, 'The Water Carrier'

I am a poet who is a woman, not a woman poet. - Ruth Fainlight

Hirshfield's poems renew, reaffirm the power of language to move deeply, to articulate experience precisely. - The Antioch Review

A large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland - Edward Hirsch

Louise Bogan's art is compactness compacted. Emotion with her, as she has said of certain fiction, is 'itself form, the kernel which builds outward form from inward intensity.' Marianne Moore

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black. . . Gwendolyn Brooks

His poems are made from his life with his life; his poems are earned. He dares to be simple. And he is surely among the finest young poets alive. - The American Poetry Review

All her poems have written underneath - 'I have seen it.' - Randall Jarrell

The poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence. - Carolyn Forche

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure. Mark Strand

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about. But the fact that writers are dealing with essential issues...I think that's a necessary integration of literary writing with what's actually going on in our world. - Marilyn Hacker

My father could only sign/His name, but he'd look at blueprints/& say how many bricks/ Formed each wall - My Father's Letters, Yusef Komunyakaa