“Ruth Ellen Kocher’s masterful fourth volume of poetry domina Un/blued is a book-length meditation on ownership, dominion, and domination. With admirable dexterity the book both decries power and celebrates empowerment. Perforated by white space, the poems seem to hover above the page, systematically undermining a linear reading. domina Un/blued is at once deeply moving and wildly intelligent… a wonderful book—sophisticated, beautiful, and innovative”— Lynn Emanuel

“domina Un/blued is resolutely austere, with each lyric appearing to start from the erasure of the preceding—like snowfall atop a snow bank. ‘Atop’ because these are chilling poems about power and powerlessness where the speaker seems ‘beautifully removed’ like ‘a lover’s eye//…a continent unto itself’; leaving the reader subject to the stark authority of Kocher’s eerie tableaux, her dissolutions of language, love and personhood. I did not read this book, I submitted to it.”— Douglas Kearney

“In domina Un/blued, Ruth Ellen Kocher painstakingly manipulates verse, visual field, and linguistics to reveal the historical violence and very personal implications of dominion, enslavement, and diaspora. The poems stutter and shudder through their observations toward their discoveries, merciless, feminist, and unforgiving. This is a book about power and powerlessness, and about suffering, about which Kocher is, unfortunately, never wrong.”— Kathy Fagan