"A new book by Gray Jacobik is always cause for rejoicing. And this one even more so, since, as of this moment, six women are running for US President. These poems in Eleanor Roosevelt's voice draw us into her story; the difficult mother-in-law, the impossible expectations, the marriage that succeeded only through private accommodations. . . . Jacobik helps us see and feel the journey that led Eleanor to become the compassionate leader we remember: 'Oh, I took back from him years ago / my vulnerability, sealed myself like a housewife / seals her preserves with paraffin.'  This is how she survived. And thrived. Roosevelt pondered: 'What good is / history . . . if no one ever learns?'—words for our troubled times. And we, contemporary readers of poetry, can learn, and learn again, the powerful lessons of this moving and courageous book. Brava Gray Jacobik, for writing these poems, and for writing them so brilliantly."

Barbara Crooker, author of "The Book of Kells" and "Some Glad Mornings"

"Eleanor Roosevelt is the woman we need to hear right now—and the voice of poet Gray Jacobik puts a rose inside Roosevelt's ever cogent, necessary thoughts, right in time for the 100th anniversary of the vote for women."

Molly Peacock, author of "The Analyst: Poems" and "The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life's Work at 72"

"This page-turning book of persona poems has the remarkable effect of bringing together the public and private lives of a woman for whom the two were carefully kept apart. Though grounded in extensive research, the book is, as Jacobik says, 'an act of literary imagination'—one that brings its subject brilliantly to life through a thoroughly realized voice that makes us feel as if we’re being spoken to in confidence."

Martha Collins

"Gray Jacobik has imagined for us a vivid lyric voice belonging to the mind of Eleanor Roosevelt. It is the voice of the private self, brimming with innermost desires, fears, angers, guilts, aspirations, loves. This voice provides a safe harbor, a place where she can unapologetically be herself, but it is also a voice that steadily records the growth of an evolving, complicated human being. Circumscribed by a multitude of inherited ideas about the duties of her gender, marriage, and class, Eleanor Roosevelt nonetheless forged for herself a soul and life that she could indeed call her own. With their etched clarity, these lyric poems tell that story, one that underpins and illuminates from within all we know about one of the great women of any century."

Fred Marchant, author of "Said Not Said"