PositiveZYZZYVA\"As charming and funny as these stories often are, they are tinged with a great sadness ... There are numerous twists... You are enjoying a well-written anecdote, laughing out loud in one sentence, only to be quieted by the next sentence. This speaks to Mukasonga’s prowess as a storyteller ... one of the great lessons of The Barefoot Woman is that we must never forget what happened in Rwanda. Mukasonga is right to not let us.\
Craig Morgan Teicher
RaveZYZZYVAPart guidebook for emerging poets and part homage to a wide range of major poets, Teicher’s We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress...is one of the most enjoyable books about poetry I have encountered. His obvious love of poetry infuses the book with the \'grace, certainty, power, and humility\' he so admires in one of his literary heroines, Lucille Clifton. Additionally, because he surveys a diverse group of writers, providing relevant biographical background and anecdotes from their lives and his own, We Begin in Gladness is a book with wide appeal ... It is interesting to review a book that is in conversation with many other books and that reviews works by other writers. In that sense, Teicher’s work offers lessons for art critics, too ... Teicher’s praise for their best poetry is tempered by his honest appraisals of their weaker efforts ... both a subtle commentary on critique and an encouraging anecdote for any poet who questions the quality of their own work ... Teicher’s book is full of insights...and it’s a pleasure to see how the poets he features in it are in conversation with one another across time (generations, even) and space. Though not necessarily a craft book, We Begin in Gladness does what all good craft books aim, but so often fail, to do—it makes the reader want to go and investigate the many works of poetry the author references and to learn more about their makers, much as (as Teicher asserts) \'a real poem points to everything beyond it.\'
Jos Charles
RaveZYZZYVA\"While all writers are concerned with language, feeld queers language in such a way that it raises questions about whether what we perceive someone to be is as important as what we call them—and, therefore, how we define their existence. feeld asks us to consider whether existence is in fact defined by naming—that is, by language.\
