From a review at "Isolda di Refiuti":
". . . a kind of constellation, a spray of associations, a nosegay, in essence not so unlike an extremely tiny version of Benjamin’s Passagen-werk, a clot of quotables . . . " [full review]
"Each page of Carol Snow’s remarkable book offers the reader phrases arranged like stones meant to be seen from the viewing platform of a single preposition. The poems posit 'something in time – like a phrase – synapsed between us,' and their movement between quotation and transcription evokes the textures of subtle, ephemeral cognitive states of relationship. Even after a brief tour of her painstakingly arranged, compassionately witty karesansui, we find our ears repositioned 'at the root of listening,' our minds newly attuned to 'effect//’s effect.' This is the singular pedagogy of Placed: while her virtuosic punctuation renders visible thought’s most minute interstices, Snow's meditative 'threshold language' allows us the 'ritual of entry' into a heightened awareness of perception’s precarious connectivity, the 'unforeseeable: between.'" —Brian Teare
"Through splicing and interweaving the voices of others through her own, Snow develops a haunting chorus of contemplation on what it means to be around, among, within. This delicate, masterful book joins Zukofsky, Waldrop, and others in a growing body of work honoring the preposition and the primacy of relationships over objects. Linking disparate fragments through their musicality, Snow shows us how connection makes meaning." —Cole Swensen
"Continuing her happy exploration of the intricacies of linguistic accident, attention, and intention, Carol Snow here presents a swirl of voices rising. Yet they rise with such fascinating arguing that eventually one reads this book like one reads a guidebook on a pilgrimage, turning corners and recognizing not because of the descriptions but because of the sounds made by describing. This poetry advances by quotation, and in the poem 'Athwart,' the quoted question is: 'Ordinary, or holy?' The answer is, both, and the answer is this book." —Bin Ramke
Praise for The Seventy Prepositions:
"Ultimately Snow contends with methods of seeing, thinking, listening, and conversing. She does this with a grace of intellect and wit of will. . . . In this book, Snow manages to do the improbable; she topples the tyranny of Self by situating it everywhere, or nowhere; you pick. But first, you must read it."—Denise Nico Leto, Xantippe
"This is a brilliant, funny, subtle book. One of Carol Snow's subjects is the tenuousness and ferocity of relationship, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise, though it does, that she has made a feast from the subject of prepositions."—Robert Hass
"A poetry—post-traumatic—half-seen, half-remembered, half-named--the event more than half gone—still every half-part is a whole, when space is equal to it. Here is a new and mesmerizing way of thinking about things."—Fanny Howe
"Carol Snow's staggering, ruthless poems hold a heroic quality that feels rare these days. With a string of improbable comrades--Lewis Carroll, Sappho, A.R. Luria, and the Zen gardeners of Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto--she tracks the intricate twists and turns of American language towards uncharted territory. Every fork in thought bristles with danger and decision. A brave book indeed!"—Andrew Schelling
Praise for Artist and Model:
"Many feminist thinkers and artists have tried in the last decade to understand the relation between gender and language, language and violence, violence and art. [Carol Snow] frames these issues at the roots of perception. . . . This is a work of difficult beauty."—Robert Hass
"[Carol Snow] teaches us, among other things, how fiercely syntax can be used as an instrument for self-scrutiny, and how brutally self-transforming a verbal action can be when undertaken in good faith. For although it is the relationship between aesthetics and politics which is most apparent in this work, it is the sustained and almost desperate personal honesty . . . which surprises and moves me."—Jorie Graham
"Not only perception informs the poems, but a conceptual daring capable of posing sunlight as wind or gratitude as the condition of things. . . . An elegiac and at times erotizing regard for the 'complexity / of resemblances' and for what resemblance leaves unstated, untouched, makes Artist and Model . . . a deeply affecting book."—Nathaniel Mackey
