"This book gives what is basic to the literary art—that felt sense of life demanded by Henry James, though the life, the whole culture here, could hardly otherwise be less Jamesian. It is almost as though the early twentieth-century civilization of a poet like López Velarde (my favorite Mexican poet) had shifted northwards over the generations, the life of the village with its strong family bonds strangely and vividly preserved beneath the differences on the surface. And whoever reads through this work must be impressed, as I was, by the power the natural-seeming and causal image has, in the hands of a true poet, to transform and illuminate."— Donald justice

" . . .the cerebral and the earthy are vividly combined, and the resulting tension between reality and fantasy yields fresh and often powerful imagery. Deeply rooted in the physical, these poems posit sensuous experience—a strain of music, a kiss, the maturation of a woman's body—as the soil from which abstrations about human nature and existence might grow."—Publishers Weekly