Booklist – Starred Review

Hamby, an award-winning poet as remarkable for her pep and juiciness as for her Whitmanesque inclusiveness, is mad for the “the dark drug of words.” In her third exhilarating collection, she takes the mockingbird, that gifted imitator, as her mentor in a dazzling set of poems titled “The Mockingbird Blues,” but Hamby is also a bit of a magpie, collecting odds and ends as she swoops through the sanctuaries of myth, art, and literature, and the flea market of pop culture. At once full of sass and formally brilliant–her ingeniously constructed poems are supersonic yet stop on a dime–Hamby is philosophical, sexy, and very funny. She writes of Paris and the Deep South, of bubble gum and Hieronymous Bosch, movies and the marquis de Sade, of the conga line of selves that make up a life, rock and roll, idolatry, and war. Hamby conjures up Babel but writes with breathtaking clarity, dispelling cacophony and diving right down into the funkiness of life and the wonder of existence.

—Donna Seaman