"This book is a total thrill. . . . Dorantes can sound at times like George Oppen. . . . Like Oppen, Dorantes is a profoundly political poet, though her own politics feel far from the 1940s Popular Front that was coin of the realm for Objectivists. Ultimately, though, any U.S. frame for reading Dorantes–even one in which she becomes a major new practicioner of the life poem–is going to fail, simply because it isn’t the frame she’s using." —Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog

"Dorantes collapses the traditional separation between author and text; subject and object; writing and written. She makes of herself a text that is written, fashioned, constructed. This gesture, which at first seems effusive and almost Whitmanesque, is actually diffuse and, at times, self-effacing. . . . Although Dorantes seems to reject certain varieties of surrealism–especially what she refers to as contemporary confessional poetry in Mexico that 'venerates the creation of image after image with no importance whatsoever given tomeaning'–some of her most intriguing, and powerful, gestures are imbued with bizarre oneiricism."

—Mark Tursi, Rain Taxi Review of Books

"[This] is a visionary book whose absent parts reclaim the author and haunt the reader. It contains spectral dimensions, whether one considers the relationship between poet and translator (collaborators, really) who shadow each other across the pages, or if you stop to notice the interplay (intertext) Dorantes allows her readers.

—Guillermo Juan Parra, Venepoetics

Hofer’s 'Translator’s Note: May Be I Had to Forget How,' which ends the volume, demonstrates not only her careful awareness of the linguistic risks of translating, but a sense of ethical and political responsibility in the act of translating that is often lacking among American translators.

—Meagan Evans, Zoland Poetry

"Dolores is pain in its plurality and this plural pain has a corollic presence in Dorantes’ poetry. She is well versed in the language of emotion, and emotion, as some scholars fail to appreciate, can still serve as the richest source material for a poet." [full review]

—Subhro Bandopadhyay/Aryanil Mukherjee, KAURAB online