"I discovered this book of poetry in 1978 and carried it in my purse (pages dogeared) for over ten years. It hasn’t been easy to find the 40 copies I’ve gifted to just about every young woman I’ve met. It includes pieces and poems of race, love, loneliness and violence against women, and the very being of women, written from Ntozakes’ very heart-filled and heartbreaking clear view of her body, her life and the world. The entries “No Gust of Wind” and “Every 3 Minutes” = Bible."

"Diane di Prima is a legendary poet and feminist. These poems are the embodiment of a woman seeing herself both as feminine and animalistic all at once. Di Prima is considered the only woman who was part of the Beat movement of poets, but in my opinion, she is the strongest voice out of all of them, even more than Allen Ginsberg. She always wrote fiercely and violently, truthfully and potently. She is a wholly original voice and this book was the first glimpse of that."

"I discovered this book of poetry in 1978 and carried it in my purse (pages dogeared) for over ten years. It hasn’t been easy to find the 40 copies I’ve gifted to just about every young woman I’ve met. It includes pieces and poems of race, love, loneliness and violence against women, and the very being of women, written from Ntozakes’ very heart-filled and heartbreaking clear view of her body, her life and the world. The entries “No Gust of Wind” and “Every 3 Minutes” = Bible."

"In college, I took a poetry class with Jorie Graham, an amazing poet. She directed me to Hass, and his stuff moved me so much. His writing is very American, spare, clean. And manly. There’s a ruggedness to his poems. One in particular I’ve always loved is called ‘Dragonflies Mating.’ It combines a sense of abandonment in childhood with natural images. I don’t even know exactly what it means, but I think that’s what poetry does—it evokes all these feelings without our really understanding why or how it’s done."

"A life’s work may occupy shelf upon shelf, or all the genius may be distilled down to a concentrate of wisdom, and I would love to think that I’ve ever thought anything as clearly as Bishop has thought each of her poems. My favorite lines forever: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."