“This fine, vigorous collection bears itself out, finding grace in its balance over a very large and unpredictable ocean.”
--Alberto Ríos

“Rick Noguchi’s first book of verse possesses the important characteristics of a plural literature. A traditional ease of storytelling, magic, and an innocence which is the heavy authority for the other two. But there is something extra in these poems. It is an odd spirituality or sensitivity, not of style, but of experience. And as great Bohemian multiculturalist Franz Kafka said, ‘It will have to stay with you.’”
--Norman Dubie

“These spare, demotic lyrics ride with innocence, humility, humor, and doggedness. The Ancient, the Little, the constant Mariner: the human soul, as bare among the cultural wreckage as it always was, surfer of the primordial.”

--Olga Broumas