"At once contemplative, haunting and joyful, A Room in California is a very large room, indeed. Laurence Goldstein is one of the few poets writing today who can comfortably and brilliantly mix popular culture with the classics, and use as perfect backdrop politics, history, art and film. The gorgeous ease with which he creates sweeping free verse lines, tight iambics and rhyme schemes melding language with subject, makes this book into a world blessedly rich with talent and importance." —Susan Hahn
— -
"The subject of A Room in California is imaginary kingdoms, from Hollywood to those in the Near East, and the drama of these poems grows out of the disparity between being merely human and, simultaneously, imagining oneself as a ruler or a god. The poems are about fantasy projections and fantastical declines and falls, and they speak to all of us who have kept scrapbooks, gone to movies, read voraciously, and watched fortune's wheel lift up some and drop others. These are beautiful, intricate poems, and this is a book of wonders." —Charles Baxter
— -
"The vivacity of these disabused stanzas suggests that their author hasn't had so much joy in life as he has had many joys; reason enough, certainly, for making many intelligent poems. As Goldstein says on rereading the 'Ode to Duty,' 'we chafe, nonetheless, in our wild Emersonian souls.' Such abrasion, surely, is responsible for the observations of a spirit sufficiently troubled by American memories to seek consolation, even pleasure, in verse." —Richard Howard
— -