The sustained originality of Peg Boyers's Hard Bread not only surpasses the notion of a merely good first book, it soars beyond the conventional expectations of 'persona' and 'dramatic monologue.' Within a few pages it's clear that this is true poetry, giving voice with unforgettable specificity to the woe, comedy and heroism of a twentieth-century life. - Robert Pinsky; Hard Bread is easy reading; Peg Boyers has found a means (a measure) of articulating speech, the thought of speech, which sets no barrier or distance between the poem cast on the page and the dramatic figure created in the mind. Her secret is chiefly a matter of versification, for what she has given us is neither criticism nor biography, heroine-worship nor historical idealization; she has written the poetry of another person, an operation requiring the paired gifts of ventriloquist and vampire. The explicit wisdom and the mysterious reticence of 'Natalia Ginzburg' (quite different from Natalia Ginzburg, author of those tough little novels) constitutes, for all Peg Boyers's modesty of address, the most original debut in my experience of contemporary American poetry. - Richard Howard The Phoenix Poets list contains a number of poets currently on my list of favorites. This is a strong, vital series which has given voice to some of the best voices in American poetry today. - Billy Collins I am touched throughout by the limpid steadiness with which each poem refuses to be budged a hairsbreadth away from the feeling behind it. As exacting in its respect for etymology as is Dickinson herself, it is one of the very few books I would recommend to someone who wanted to know what the lyric poem can do that no other medium can. - James McMichael
