“Much can be said about Story and I hope a lot is; the work is significant and complex and there’s nothing quite like it. And there is so much about it as a collection and as a paradigm that feels important to our world today, right now. To say it too is timely would be an understatement; that so many are struggling to learn, understand, and even identify the source of the global public health crisis is applicable to this text. And derivable from this text.” — Greg Bem, North of Oxford

“Story is fantastic at letting you know what you seek in texts and, on another reading perhaps, how you feel about what you cannot help but seek or pick up on. Do you want a story? Do you want an event to follow without disassociating from it? Do you want to be reading sentences like beads of lit water?”
— Nasim Luczaj, SPAM zine & Press

“As in photography in its most potent form, the poem confronts the reader with a language hovering uncertainly between the aesthetic and the political, between art and evidence. The reader must then ask of the poem: What is it that flashes up, and what might we glimpse, if we can simply hold open, even momentarily, the interstices of a story?”
— Rachael Guynn Wilson, The Brooklyn Rail

“This is a skillful and philosophically rich addition to Firestone’s stimulating body of work.“ — Publishers Weekly

”Story revels in fragments and narrative threads, and opens with a binary: two threads, almost as a call-and-response, a description-to-action, an action-to-Greek-chorus, that expand and twist throughout the book, evolving to intertwine into something larger.” — Rob Mclennan

“The story told here is smart, ironic, impressively pyrotechnic, and quietly wrenching. Story makes an impressive addition to Firestone’s experimental oeuvre.“
— David Karp, Heavy Feather Review

”Firestone’s free-verse poems, populated with bones, a tiresome sea, light, death, straggling vines, robots, and particles, are disjointed. They record and preserve the view while trying to remain true to the shockingly fragmentary way in which the mind moves and comments. The lines deliberately resist the process of making meaning, at least a linear, deductive meaning; instead, they allow the body, with its emotional intelligence, to have a more shaping voice.“ — Kathryn Weld, American Book Review

Ten is a longitudinal expression of life within recovery. There is imperative and there is urgency and there is, really, a longing to overcome and thrive…Far from melodramatic, Firestone’s work is ever-personal, a clear portrayal of self, a chiseled proclamation of experience, and it also feels incredibly relatable.”
— Greg Ben, North of Oxford

“Within the restraints of the ten-line procedure these poems amaze with their diverse range of formal turns and the experiences they map out.”
— Patrick Pritchett, Writing the Messianic

“I want to introduce this book to you, because it touched me, because it was the book I needed, because it contains all of my grief and could, if you let it, contain yours.”
—Timothy Otte, Chicago Review of Books

“Firestone writes poetry that breaks through the noise of the political moment and our short attention spans to pull us into wider but ever-present human concerns, reminding us that art is necessary for living.” — Karen Weiser, Hyperallergic

“Firestone renders a series of deeply perceptive and formally sharp lyric sequences into an extended elegy.“
— Publishers Weekly

“There is a beautifully haunting atmosphere in these lyrics, and I feel I am in the carriage as I read, traveling through different places and times, taking in a landscape that is teaching me about the fragility of existence.”
— Julia Johanne Tolo, Poetry Project Newsletter

“Firestone’s work inhabits this expansive and elusive middle realm between lyric and narrative.”
— Nicholas Birns, The Tropes of Tenth Street

“Gates & Fields evokes both lyrical continuity—perception through gate to field—and crystalline juxtaposition, the paratactic magic of rubbing gate and field together.”
— Tamas Panitz, Boston Review

“Musical, made of repeating sounds, rhymes. There is space around the utterances and, reading, I relished this grace.“
— Jill Magi

“Packs in an enormous, and enormously restrained, emotional content while utilizing sound, rhythm and repetitions, echoes and precision.” — Rob Mclennan’s Blog

“I am lulled into this book’s beauty through the sounds and the sparse images that drive it.“ — Ely Shipley, Tarpaulin Sky

“How much the verse here imitates thought in real time is remarkable, as in here where the speaker moves from a beautifully poetic thought snapped back to reality by the light of a recording device." — Kimberly Ann Southwick, Ploughshares

“Encountering Swimming Pool, I finally realize, after years of reading her work, that Firestone’s radical poetics dovetails with the philosophical undertaking of the idea of “affect”—slippery states of responses and intensities relating between and emanating from bodies.“ — Jill Magi

“Firestone strikes elegiac notes offhandedly and yet the effect is never less than sharp. The multilayered complexity of urban experience is the terrain of these episodic poems—they do “flash” past us as trains, sirens, and other pedestrians might. The in-betweenness of this seeming chaos is where Firestone finds respite…” — Albert Mobilio, Hyperallergic

“[Firestone] uses a photographic imagination as a framework to insert ambiguity into the alleged fixity of photography and subjectivity.” — Jill Magi, Queen Mob’s Tea House

“In addition to the political message and cultural verdict, Flashes is a pleasure to read. Amongst the chaos of postmodernity, there is something delightfully quiet amid Firestone’s language. This sense of unexpected composure is somehow infectious. It is authentic, a language careful and sharp.”
— Charlotte Annie, Bombay Gin

“Flashes is informed by a density, by proximity and driven by the daily connection and disconnection of the urban condition.”
— Mark Gurarie, Boog City

“Here is a certain kind of consciousness that pervades all the poems, one that is caught up with trying to understand the motivation behind “travel,” the exaltations of the uncertain soul seeking a sense of fulfillment, and how it is very different than “vacation,” or the guilt of leisure, gluttony, and consumption.”
— Jackie Clark, Coldfront Magazine

“Holiday reads as a travel (/poetry-) notebook with an edge. Firestone offsets her experience of location with that of dislocation, as though her travels in Europe have provided her with the opportunity ‘to vacation the hell / out of things’; to indulge in the tourist gaze while intently questioning it.”
— Sarah Law, Stride Magazine

“This book works as an antidote to the solipsistic bumping around that often afflicts poetry circles, in and out of colleges and universities. This book says: here’s the conversation, or a piece of it, the one that is happening right now, and let that conversation be a peep-hole and if you like, let that be your entrée.” — Lindsey Boldt, Ridiculous Human Things

“What a gift to have the art of letter writing preserved into our current century. I’m still fond of the letters of John Keats, but they don’t have the kind of immediacy and relevance to my present life I find in the letters in Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community.”
— Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Galatea Resurrects

“The anthology is an amazing window into the life and mind of a certain kind of contemporary poetry. The letter form seems to have allowed many of the writers to be much more revealing than they would have been using, say, the essay form, so the unguarded and exploratory back and forths shed light in all directions.” — Travis Nichols, Poetry Foundation

“But while there is no shortage of books on the ins and outs of contemporary poetics, this one offers something most don’t: evidence that a poet’s community fulfills a basic need—to speak and be heard.“ —Craig Morgan Teicher, Bookforum