"di brandt?s mother, not mother probes the reality of a life filled with dualities and uncertainties... [it] stands as testimony to the remarkable range of poetic devices brandt uses in expressing her worded truths."? Books in Canada "di brandt?s poems spill out of their taut couplet form into the reader?s listening heart. These are miraculously wide-open poems, raging and ecstatic, speaking always the language of a woman who has eaten the dragon and lived to sing of it to us, intimately, insistently, the language of deep conversation between selves, daughters in a violent world."? Daphne Marlatt