"Again and again reading Carol Potter's poems I think, yes, this is just how it is this tricky, tender, funny human existence. With spare, strikingly precise language, sharp insight, and laugh-outloud humor, this is a wonderful collection that had me reading poems aloud to my students, family, and friends. I hope it reaches many. --Ellen Bass

With their unembellished surfaces, these poems excavate post-modern experience with a spare eloquence. Quotidian moments crack open, as in Translation Problems, when the speaker observes I was riding/ in the wrong coach./ I was sitting backwards/ in a foreign tongue. Loss, that hole in the world through which/ what might go does go and keeps on going occasions many poems; for ballast, speakers employ a comic timing ( Party Girl Bites Guest, for example) that razors pieties. Potter's concluding sequence of poems with God as the main character will delight. Grass is Always Greener opens with There's always something we're missing./ God likes us like that. Dissatisfied. Read this book for its satisfying mix of wisdom and of wit". --Robin Becker