Reviews and Blurbs

“Cecilia Woloch’s poetic voice has grown more lyrically confident with each new book. Now with Carpathia, she attempts to lyricize each aspect of her narrated life and succeeds with fine breathtaking abandon. The book is zany with music — from Le Jazz Hot to bluegrass to gypsy violins. These are poems full of wind, light and whistle-stops… Carpathia is that place where we begin to know our own unfamiliarity with what is most present — and long to love, like these poems, our own stories of passion and journeys home.”

— Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California, The Huffington Post

“Cecilia Woloch’s voice is both intense and precise. In so many of these poems, the forces of memory and longing are expertly brought under the sweet governance of craft and form.”

— Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States

“Carpathia seems to me the truest, fullest expression of a soul in quest of its true home I’ve yet read. Cecilia Woloch receives the world right on her skin, responds to it with her whole physical being, and fearlessly, in all its mystery and beauty, and also in its sadness and cruelty and disappointment. There’s a headlong, rushing quality here, but a great sensual leisure, as well. It’s a wonderful book.”

—Mary Ann Taylor-Hall

“…a poet who is passionately alive in the world.”

— Natasha Trethewey

“Her traveling poetics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of ‘narrative’ and ‘lyric’; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift.”

— Sacramento News & Review

“Celia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succombs to loss, where ‘fat bees [fall] into the wine’ and the ghost swans have ‘wings of death.’ The highlights of this collection are… peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful.”

— Devil’s Lake Journal

“One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry is that it so beautifully and skillfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness…”

— The Cosmopolitan Review

“To write movingly about love in an era infused with hate requires a special gift: nostalgia hard-edged with realism. She has that gift.”

— Maxine Kumin

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