“…her lines simmering and ultimately erupting like a geyser, the reader taken on an exhilarating ride.

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“ Dezember has created telephone lines through time that reopen essential conversations. Her poetry sent me back to Ginsberg to reread and listen to ‘Howl’ which I had not done in at least fifteen years. The bounty of colors, the unabashed sensuality, the ecstasy of ‘saying yes’ took me back to Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself.’ And most poignantly, through these telephone lines, we hear female voices that have been silenced speak to us, and we must listen closely no matter how enraged we feel…I can’t imagine that in the great cosmic literary and artistic conversations that transcend time that Whitman, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Peters, Franklin, and O’Keeffe are not also giving thanks to Mary Dezember as we all should.”

“Mary Dezember’s poems evoke a soul-searching reminiscent of that experienced when reading John Berryman or Walt Whitman, as she puts her private wants in public view. While many poets shy away from the word ‘soul,’ Dezember uses this word in almost every poem in Earth-Marked Like You.  Dezember’s work and artistry are defined by her search for soul and her use of poems to speak on her soul’s behalf.  The result is edgy, raw, and sensual . . .Despite her losses, Dezember remains an optimist, testing her theory about the existence of soul-love again and again.  Earth-Marked Like You is Dezember’s manifesto—that we are all connected beyond our fleshy restraints.”

““The passionate, frustrated understanding in her poem ‘Burning Alone’ or her perfect sense of complete, transcending love in ‘Nakedness’ should please seekers of heart-felt emotion and those searching for that mystical link between sensuality and spirituality.””

““Her exploration of the most vital of human experiences will echo in your mind for a long time.””

“Mary Dezember’s new collection is enormous in scope, technical skill and experiment, and surprise. An enormous achievement. Poems like ‘Skin Traveler’ are sudden master poems that surprise and please: ‘Your body is a map of everywhere I want to go./Yet I can see none of these places are on earth./With you, I become otherworldly, a skin traveler. . .” Above all her precinct is love. With the variety of Sappho’s solitudes, sensualities, and ironic humor, she gives us her galaxies and moon, in movement like everything on earth, before her observing and transforming eye. Read her and be transformed.”

“In the searching poems of Earth-Marked Like You, Mary Dezember tracks the vicissitudes, challenges, and triumphs of the soul trapped in a body—writing passionately of the ‘memories we hide in our bodies’ and ‘harvested farmlands of pain,’ alongside ‘drifts of kindness like/Banners of snowflakes warming the sky’ and the soul’s ultimate freedom: ‘Nakedness is not our clothes falling away,/but our bodies, our bodies flung off finally,/freeing us . . .’  These are poems of a life’s journey and hard-won knowledge.”

“Mary Dezember’s poetry is a blend of lyrical intensity, grounded in scenes of real life. Her often startling juxtapositions raise large questions, and explore layers of different kinds of loss. Her work has a rich sense of place, beautifully and sometimes starkly set in the New Mexico landscape. In Dezember’s poetry, which pushes against a ‘fixed life’ toward another, there is ultimately, a deep sense of hope that is uplifting.”

““I’m struck by the passion and beauty of these poems, their sensuality and deep spiritual nature . . . these are just astonishingly powerful and moving.” ”

““Strong, unique voice that I am grateful to have the chance to publish.””