Mehta’s approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions.”
— Publishers Weekly starred review

“Mehta’s work is sophisticated and filled with knockout imagery, lurking empathy, and inventive, joyful-to-read-out-loud language.”
— Bloom

”Mehta, a poet in New York City, induces a staccato rhythm of poetic effusion, darting from insight to insight with the graceful and erratic comportment of one “wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue.”
— LitHub

“The collection changes key signatures like a startling symphony.”
—Tupelo Quarterly

In a time when memory is in short supply, Diane Mehta is the poet to remind us where the muses came from and what they mean to show us: how overwhelming the view is when we look back from the precipice to which we’ve climbed. To poems about isolation and community, and to what will surely stand as the most powerful poem of the shocking early days of the pandemic, she brings a superb ear for language pitched towards music, a fascination for the way words combine into revelation. With Homer, Milton, Dante, and Whitman as her guides, she has found her way where few of her contemporaries would even think to go.”
—Jordan Smith, author of Little Black Train

“Diane Mehta’s ekphrastic poems dilate and amplify and burn, enact that Yeatsian notion that ‘[a]rt is love modeled in experience / fired at higher temperatures than experience.’ These poems give us a speaker whose unruly feelings are wildly metered, and ‘who refuses to cohere in an abstract field.’ In her radical insistence on taking in the whole ‘bee-vibrating’ world through the senses, these poems revivify the Eden of art and emotion.” 
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“These are lavish, lush poems about the power of art. Diane Mehta’s attention to the music that lives in words and the metaphorical possibilities that inhabit images is astonishing. A building ‘leans into the its shade of angles’ and a flower is ‘burdened by its scent, its silhouette all season / petaling and unpetaling.’ Her erudite and complex mind steps always to the side, to observe, to think. ‘My clocks tick-tock with caveats,’ Mehta tells us. ‘No peace of mind.’
—Kevin Prufer, author of Fear