"My favorite book of poetry. Hodgen makes the ordinary and the plain profound again and again. We all struggle to come up with the words to attach to our grief, our confusion, our losses. Hodgen is not immune to the plight. You can feel and appreciate the effort. He wrestles each of the ingenious little masterpieces from the struggle and the search."

"I love sonnets, with their iambic pentameter. This collection has most of her best-known works, but my favorite “I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore,” is in her Selected Poems edition. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, only the third woman to do so. All her life she was an activist for women’s rights."

"“Grief and Reason” is the book I most often return to. It contemplates death as it has been presented in prose and poetry over the ages. The book continually asks the question of whether loss creates a sense of self or destroys it. It also poses the question of whether loss or mourning can bring forth a new artistic language."