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“Beaumont is a poet who clearly wants her books to take on the climb; Letters from Limbo climbs its own extensive implications with mountaineering brio. . . . When reading these poems, there are times when it is necessary to pause for more than breath. They generate unusual power though this rarely seems their aim.”
–The Manhattan Review
“Avid readers of Beaumont have come to expect a lot from her poems—poems that are simultaneously spare and expansive, smart, ambitious, playful and disturbing. They will not be disappointed by this book, which is certain to gain many new readers for one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry.”
—The Bloomsbury Review
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“Beaumont co-edited The Poets’ Grimm,…and a vivid fairy tale sensibility pervades her most original work in this second collection…. Some poems depend on tour-de-force conceits: one shows what rocks would say if they had their own language . . . while another gives ingenious excerpts “From the Book of the Boot.” Nineteenth-century Europe (from the Napoleonic wars to the rise of the parasol and the heyday of absinthe) makes another inspiration for Beaumont’s glittery works, whose contemporary analogues range from Brenda Hillman to James Tate.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This collection of beguiling poems, one of the five winners of the 1996 National Poetry Series, takes as its avenue into experience the palpable, quotidian objects of the intimate environment. . . . Beaumont’s way of seeing is only a step from an ancient way of interpreting the inert things that surround us as omens or animated carriers of meaning. What is the thing we see, and what does it signify? If that is in a way primitive, it is also classical.”
—Boston Globe
“One thing is for certain, The Poets' Grimm, splendidly edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, will become a classic in the vast literature on fairy tales. It deserves to be read and studied, and it should be sold by the thousands to general readers, students, and scholars. . . . Altogether this anthology is a most welcome and appreciated addition to the world of fairy tales.”
—Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies