"Tracy Mishkin writes with a wry and delicious honesty, her images vivid and memorable. Here the personal observation often colludes with a larger, overwhelming reality, resulting in poems that are timely and fresh. ... Only a real talent could present our complicated reality so truly and so well."

--Sarah Gordon. author of Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination and A Literary Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia

"Read This is Still Life for the astonishing way it braids darkness and light. Read these poems for hope in a broken time. Whatever your reasons, read these poems. And do it now."

--Kiki Petrosino, author of Witch Wife

"An anthem against apathy."

--Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016)

"Tracy Mishkin's clear, practical language cuts to the heart of the quotidian to expose the hopelessness of the American dream, a circle of our own particular hell where Despair sleeps on a pool table with his head on the eight ball. Hers is an unswerving intelligence that sees in the way her neighbors 'cut their eyes' what it means to be Jewish in a nation where a third of the population believes only Christians are truly American. But she also finds in a drawer of odd socks a 'ray of yes in a world of no.' It is with such small whimsicalities that Mishkin would rouse the pool-table sleeper. Our sense of the absurd may not save our lives, but it may save our souls."

--Sherry Chandler, author of The Woodcarver's Wife