“Christiansë approaches epic dimensions of classical poetry. While she draws from a repertoire of forms, it is language that serves her sense of composition. Seamlessly, craft yields a lyricism that lifts individuals into view. . . . Her criteria for poetics—a language luscious, yet bittersweet—bring wondrous decorum to Castaway.” — Zoë Anglesey , Multicultural Review
“Christiansë gives us not nature’s or history’s ‘glut of facts,’ but the desire to comprehend various histories—to make history real, to feel history—and the realization of what an impossible desire this may be. . . . [T]he book makes clear that lyricism and narrativity are not opposites; the ways in which they can be related are multiple, complicated, sometimes suspect, but necessary for a sense of human community and . . . for poetry.” — Lisa M. Steinman , The Women’s Review of Books
“A remarkable book. It’s a delight to discover a poet who makes use of all the techniques that have been too readily ceded to fiction: character development, a complex use of place and time, an interweaving of historical fact and writerly imagination, while deploying the compression and verbal legerdemain that are the particular province of the poet.” — Marilyn Hacker
“Yvette Christiansë’s Castaway has a personal and historical trajectory that embraces the emotional velocity of this fine, urgent collection of poems. It conjures silence and great distance, emotionally and physically, but the poems are excursions through language and subject matter aimed at connecting the reader to the unimaginable by a finely-tuned and far-reaching imagination.” — Yusef Komunyakaa