What critics say: “Joan Larkin has written poems that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed…For her, poetry is a form of witness; she offers no false hopes, no resolutions, except to reflect, as honestly and directly as she can manage, the complicated, at times uncontrollable, messiness of being alive…This is poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace.”— David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times.
