“The difficulties of making art about violence might have churned the poems into melodrama or diffused them into abstraction, but Bachmann’s temperate approach yields work that is eerily calm and anything but bloodless. Tough and impressive, ‘Temper’ leaves its mark.”

"Here we have metamorphosis, resonance, transfromation, the alchemy of art. Bachmann is able by a few simple direct gestures . . . to connect her personal grief and tragedy to the whole tradition of English (and Western) verse and to the poetic impulse itself to make beauty out of sorrow."
—Poetry

“A thorough and vivid emotional narrative, taking the reader to an unsettling depth of personal tragedy at breakneck speed.”
—Oxford American