"This poet writes like a woman with a mission. Her collection resounds with an honesty that is at once brutal and determined. "You will not go hungry into a strange soil," she writes to her jaundiced infant....Bland browbeats her way through a sort of autobiography. The characters, primarily family-mother, father, stepfather, husband, children dead and alive....Held fast by neat lines and stanzas, these poems batter on concepts such as the connection between sex and death....Soft Box speaks for itself and does not speak softly. Bland writes like a woman possessed, and the result is bewitching..." -ForeWord Magazine

Other: Jane Cooper