RaveThe Iowa Review\"At times it feels that Viren is offering her readers the empirical results of an experiment in human curiosity that resists all exploitation and relies wholly on generosity ... Viren’s ability to explore feeling so deeply without evincing upset is one of the things that makes the collection so unique. There is no polemic, even against an interview subject who professes the virtues of gay conversion therapy, or against the state of Texas where her Iowa marriage to her wife was \'outright banned.\' There is no panic in the prose, no recoil, and yet the reader instinctively feels both ... Mine is the work of a comprehensive and cautious mind, one that has worked to thread its conflicting thoughts together before bringing them to the page, and one that isn’t seeking a discovery so much as a conversation. Viren shows us that trying to own a thing, even a story, even an entire book you’ve written, is often only a way to lose it faster.\
Diana Khoi Nguyen
RaveKenyon Review\"In any great poetry, the white space is as inflected as the text, and Nguyen has crafted a book wherein the white space is so inflected it seems to vibrate ... Nguyen’s book feels populated not so much by \'experimental\' poetry as by poetry that is shaped by suffering; the poems are the exact shape they have to be to accommodate, and attempt to bear, the weight of tragedy ... So much of the genius of this book is also in the candor ... Nguyen is not attempting to control that shifting but rather acknowledge its power. The book can feel like a private exercise, as if we are watching the speaker’s effort toward accommodating the shapes loss carves into her life. It is as if, at times, we are not even her reader, that the book would exist without our gaze.\
