"Scates’s lyrical language and attention to detail (‘dear little waterfall in June, / town still green in August, / snow unmelted in the mountains’) make these ruminative poems a pleasure to read." —Publishers Weekly
“With frank detail and philosophical clarity, Scates addresses parental loss, the passage of time, and the pain of childhood abuse. The book is driven by sorrow, but it is also devotional, guided by a determination to comprehend the elusive presences of other people, beauty, life.” —New Yorker
“With sumptuous detail, Maxine Scates exposes the amorphous dimensions of grief, immersing us in her wilderness of falling oaks, ice storms, hospitals, beloved dogs, and her mother’s slow dying. At the same time, she never fails to give us the mystery of the possible. This is a poet I trust, a poet I want to follow, one so deft she can parse the difference between eternity and infinity, writing ‘one has more light.’ My Wilderness is rich, wandering, and true.” —Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath