“... One day her sister asked Mz N to have her baby. This was intriguing this was frightening as there had been no babies come thru her & to have a baby not her baby seemed a strong hard thing to split the body for. Shitting a pumpkin is what a friend of Shulamith Firestone said in the late 1960s it was like ...”

“... beach where dogs should be leashed but aren’t. Low tide strands the seaweed and two dead seals no one can call to help. There’s no one to call for help. A shore of men’s trash, twine, bits of mooring line, the house of what was once alive no I didn’t per se find my beach! but ...”

“... So we walked one block east to the next Starbucks, a non-original Starbucks, where there was no line at all, and we stopped and got coffee, then resumed our walk, talking about authenticity, origins, belonging, reproducibility, Melville, the local, the global, frappuccinos, the English language, the Italian language, what kind of world it is where ...”

“... gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances of work-life or change, or hardship, or small or no education that attended it, the power of a strange spiritual sweetness, fibre and inward health, have also attended.Whitman visited the wounded for three years, distributing money (given to him by wealthy supporters) and food, writing letters home on the ...”

“... I’ll be in the woodshed in L–. Xavier won’t know I don’t live here anymore. We are no longer in touch. It’s been three months since his last email, which I did not reply to.’ Throughout the book, the narrator times herself against such markers. Time and timing are relative, subjectively and compulsively measured. The exigencies of ...”

“... have said a lot: ‘Names are in people, people are in names.’ She was doyenne of the pseudonym. No other significant poet in English goes by initials. Hilda Doolittle also wrote under pen names – Delia Alton, Edith Gray, Rhoda Peter and Helga Dart – but she never published under any of them. Inscribing herself as H.D.  (well before Ezra Pound ushered ...”

“... The argument​ laid out in the first four poems of Some Say, Maureen McLane’s newest collection (Farrar, Straus, £20), encapsulates the one she makes in the whole book, and in all her poetry. The collection starts out in medias res, with the first poem’s title, ‘As I was saying, the sun’, taking a running leap into the poem itself: ‘& the moon and all the stars/you can name/are fantastic!’ This sets a tone of exuberance which is immediately deflated: ‘It’s not cool/to be enthusiastic ...”

“... Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque, Gazelle Mba, Azadeh Moaveni, Toril Moi, Joanne O’Leary, Niela Orr, Lauren Oyler, Susan Pedersen, Jacqueline Rose, Madeleine Schwartz, Arianne Shahvisi, Sophie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Alice ...”