"Truly a triumph, this collection is a soaring, seething, singing achievement of poetic excellence. In, O Lady, Speak Again, Dayna Patterson gives us meticulously crafted poems without sacrificing a single breath of emotional dynamism. In the voices of Shakespeare’s lady characters, Patterson deftly evokes the depth and complexity of responses to the burdens and griefs of being a woman held in the confines of a patriarchal society, governed by an all-male religious hierarchy. These poems are both haunting and soothing in their questions and their graceful, ladylike rage.” —Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate (2021–2023) 

"What do you get when you blend Shakespeare’s canon of female characters with an already-­steaming brew of the personal and culturalisms of Mormondom? O Lady, Speak Again is a love song to feminine power and artistry—power both practical and metaphysical, emergent and handed-down. Patterson repurposes with such insight that it feels like sorcery: a sprinkle of weird enlivens the familiar with mystery, and a dash of familiar grants us access to the strange.” —Nano Taggart, editor, Sugar House Review

"O Lady, Speak Again does its work in a glory, a tumble, then a flood, of characters, versions, and voicings. The beginning poem ‘Dramatis Personae,’ which limns the territory and the method of the collection, shows us that the urgent appeal of the title—that the Lady (mother, goddess, enchantress, witch) must speak from the parched silence to which she has been consigned—requires an upending to be fulfilled: that the world, to be made fecund, musical, brilliant again, must receive ‘a blue deluge’ of the Lady’s voice. The speakers of the poems inhabit gorgeous languages and a multitude of stories, many drawn from Shakespeare; Dayna Patterson embroiders the lacunae in her sources and insists on retellings and revisions in this miracle of a book. In a way, like Prospero in The Tempest, Patterson orchestrates madness, terror, and catastrophic loss, into reconciliation, claiming that power as her own deep, decidedly female, and restorative, magic.” —Lisa Orme Bickmore, Utah Poet Laureate