Falling Off the Roof

the long version

“Wry, sad, angry poetry, sometimes delicate as fine brushwork, sometimes powerful as hammer blows. When she picks up mythology it is at once to transform it into a personal expression and to not think of poetry in which a woman’s complicated relationship of pride, fear, narcissism, and amusement with her own body is dealt with more precisely. But the best thing in these poems is that when they come off, which is often, and even when they don’t, the voice is always Karen Lindsey’s and nobody else’s. She has created her own voice already, her own range of characteristic subjects and emotions, her own inflections.” —Marge Piercy