Storyknife: New and Selected Poems

“Mary Baron may sit on Parnassus with such masters of the short lyric as e.e. cummings, J.V. Cunningham, Samuel Menashe and David Ignatow. Her home for many years and the setting for much of her poetry is Alaska, where in snow and ice and libraries she disappeared from her publisher’s view for some 25 years, only to be discovered in Florida. She often writes poems informed by devotion, whereas none of her “companions” was, as far as I know, believers. She struggles to avoid a wasted word, syllable, vowel or consonant. The very nature of her integrity and emotional power is original (sometimes eccentric); the target is poetry, which she harpoons, cutting away the blubber—rejecting this notion—I could better say her weapon is kindness, which she uses to save the world.” —Stanley Moss