“Maria Terrone’s poems are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sen­su­ous and spir­i­tu­al, earthy and intel­lec­tu­al. Her imag­i­na­tion takes fire from con­tra­dic­tion and com­plex­i­ty. One small image—washing a pota­to or rear­rang­ing a lin­gerie drawer—can open up vis­tas of pri­vate desire or pub­lic his­to­ry. Her poet­ry explores the con­tin­gen­cies of time and eter­ni­ty, the mys­te­ri­ous inter­pen­e­tra­tion of real­i­ty and the imag­i­na­tion.”
— Dana Gioia

“As alert to the edgy polit­i­cal nature of con­tem­po­rary real­i­ty (‘the names of nations changing/ as peo­ple revolt and take aim’) as they are to the lumi­nous ener­gies of ordi­nary facts, or the hard truths of the body’s own shock­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, or the com­pli­cat­ed inher­i­tance drawn from her beloved Italian ances­try, Maria Terrone’s poems see ‘eye to eye’ with a world she can at once cel­e­brate and grieve over, but for which she shows a deep, empa­thet­ic, rich­ly artic­u­late under­stand­ing. Thoughtful, ground­ed, even vision­ary at times, her lan­guage in this mature third col­lec­tion is a kinet­ic mix of keen-eyed obser­va­tion and unsen­ti­men­tal judg­ment. In one poem she sees ‘gnarled hawthorn trees that lean/towards me like ques­tion marks.’ As a poet she lives, like the rest of us, in a world of ques­tions marks—but what shines through them is the fierce light of the life force itself, telling her ‘it’s pos­si­ble for a body to float on joy.’ ”
— Eamon Grennan

“Maria Terrone’s eyes and ears are hon­ey, and her touch is ‘near enough to lift each hair on my skin.’ Through trau­ma and joy her nuanced and evoca­tive poems are insis­tent and alive. Terrone pin­points unfor­get­table moments and we can feel the shock of dis­cov­ery as she enacts how ‘to sus­pend your life for anoth­er.’ ”
— Annie Marie Macari

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