“Stewart offers sequences and serial poems that move across historical time, and continually reveal the ominous hiding in the innocuous, or vice versa (“burning bread smells like / baked earth”). . . . This gathering of poems, with their masterful cadences, allegorically pitched narratives and various speakers “bound / deep to old griefs and wonder,” build toward an indictment of aggression and war. . . . These poems ask the reader to register anew, from 'small changes of perspective,' the darker implications [of] what we take for granted.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Understated and Zen-like, these are carefully rendered poems. Setting a prayerful tone and somber theme, Stewart looks back to the Garden of Eden with a stunning evocation of the creation story and the murder of Abel. . . . Stewart uses figures of speech and sound not just as a way to provide glitter but as a way to create contemporary versions of classical tragedy.”
— Library Journal
“What we cannot fail to hear, in Red Rover, is a wise and troubled lullaby for what may yet prove to be the infancy of our species.”
— Ange Mlinko, Nation
“In these elegantly crafted poems, Stewart cocks her head and looks at the world a little differently, capturing an owl’s flight, a boy’s voice, a terrible massacre in beautiful but unfussy language that wants to communicate. No nursery rhymes here but instead a deep understanding of the edginess and violence that seep unbidden into our lives.”
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
“Stewart’s formal dexterity enriches the book as form and content palpably influence one another. . . . This range creates a sense of profusion that complements the book’s redemptive vision of the natural world.”
— Times Literary Supplement
"The poems in Red Rover are profound, frimly grounded in the literary tradition and yet insistent upon reversal and chaotic, unexpected upending. They are a puzzle to return to over time and a blessing of immediacy."
— Sacramento News & Review
"To pick up Susan Stewart's latest volume of poems and to begin to read is to enter an enchanted place of childlike trust and imaginative force, tempered and unsettled by the dislocations of adult experience."
— Rita Signorelli-Pappas, World Literature Today
"Among American poets, Susan Stewart is writing the most significant poetry of our time."
— Lisa Williams, The Hollins Review
"'Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006' . . . is one of the most significant poems written out of America.”--John Kinsella. Salt Magazine
— John Kinsella, Salt Magazine
