Love and the Eye

In Love and the Eye there is no world, only images of a world holding so fast to us we are more nature than human, more landscape than flesh. There is a delicate elegance in the shifting gaze of these poems. One leans into their beauty because of all the ways they do not settle down, because of all the ways they insist on seeing.

— Claudia Rankine

Here is a voice that will stay with you long after the book is closed and safely on your shelf. A haunting, once-upon-a-time voice, as if a wide-eyed child lost in the woods forever and a day emerged, finally, to speak.

— Alice Friman

Love and the Eye is playful and grave, wry and intimate, self-deprecating and passionate. It is precise and yet has the sideways movement of dreams. Newbern speaks in a voice completely her own, showing us everything from an angle we hadn’t seen with surprising and revelatory clarity.

— Reginald Gibbons

Shining sadness limns these poems—quiet grief like the dark edge of a cloud or field: ever-present and capable of making one who loves love harder.

— Natasha Trethewey