"To read Claire Bateman’s poetry is to realize that even the brightest among us are often confounded by life. In Leap, we are treated not just to a compelling conspiracy of “things,” like sofas and dresses, but also to meditations that place our worldly concerns in healthy perspective. Though Leap is her fifth book, Claire Bateman is still a secret to too many of us who love good poetry. This is wrong. And I’m telling as many people as I can about her."

—Dennis Morton, co-host of The Poetry Show

I say Claire Bateman is weirder, deeper, weirdeeper, and in that way better than the poets some say are so damned good. Those poets just make me go ‘Huh?’ and ‘Oh, sure,’ whereas Bateman makes me go ‘Sheesh!’ and ‘Holy espresso!’

—Mark Halliday

In Claire Bateman’s poems, everything—dumpster couches, "hysterical" keys, “the herringbone braid,”—is enveloped by a startling consciousness too boundary-less to maintain a sane grasp of reality. So the poems create new, fresher ones. What a beautifully nebulous and stinging slap in the face these poems enact, a pantheistic binge. Just where the hell are you taking me, Claire Bateman? Like some kind of ontological roller coaster, these poems are scary as hell, but you can’t help going back for more.

—David Dodd Lee

"Bateman lets her imagination roam over the ways in which meaning accrues to things, mapping, as she says in 'Sugar Constellation': 'events & entities/that are larger on the inside than they are on the outside.'”

—Richard Jeffrey Newman, NewPages.com

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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