"In Carolyn Guinzio's luminous new book, Cameo Blue, she has set herself a large task: to hold the world by observing nature and to recognize the role of artifice in doing so. The poet then becomes not only a shaper of words on the page, but a spokesperson for the subtleties of light, the body, the relation of safety to danger, and the redemptive noise of language. And it is the eye as well that serves this process: her imagery is gorgeous and true, reality as beauty. She doesn't turn away from difficulty: not even death separates her characters from their generative tasks: 'their dead / appearing as if nothing / is wrong, going on about / what to plant this year . . .' This poetry recognizes eternity but dwells in the moment, always savored by the speaker's bold eye and ear."

Maxine Chernoff

"I am in awe of Carolyn Guinzio. Every poem in this book is a sea—an immense, mystic system made of both salt and dream, and what is the dream? That time bends grief the way water bends light; that being separates us, only so that we might know we are never apart. Cameo Blue startles me alive."

Rebecca Gayle Howell

"To read Cameo Blue is to find oneself pausing in exquisite double takes. Here, the workaday world offers itself only to step back a pace and then return, beautifully foreign. These are shimmering poems whose 'eerie quaking' . . . 'marks the border of being alone / and not alone.' Surely we all know rupture, death, or the diminishment of a world wracked by environmental crises. Carolyn Guinzio perceives these things keenly, and then perceives still further, redeeming loss with fierceness and delicacy, 'fighting specter / with specter.'"

Elizabeth Robinson