"Jo-Ann Mort's poems move with astonishing mastery between the exigencies of history and the intensities of private life. Admirers of Denise Levertov and Muriel Rukeyser will find in these pages another writer to love."

-Brian Morton

"These are poems of utmost urgency by an American who looks hard and renders tragedy in minute detail, at first hand, and with an eerie precision. Whether she is writing of a fellow passenger praying on a Brooklyn subway or of devoted worshippers in Croatia, her portraits are moving and deeply human. In her travels, which range from Eastern Europe to Africa to Israel, she captures history: she writes of mass graves and corpses contrasted with a peaceful garden; of God's tears watering the stones of Warsaw and of a robust wine in Sicily. Her love scenes, set in faraway places, are compelling for their emotional accuracy. Staring in the face of death, she finds life to be 'a precise chaos / that we the living, / must endure.'"

-Grace Schulman

"These poems, fruits of a lifetime, take us so many places, from former Yugoslavia and Paris to 'the up and down of everyday, ' and into so many corners of the heart."

-Katha Pollitt