Reviews of When the Moon Knows You're Wandering
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"If we are all sometimes lost, as these haunting poems recognize, the gift is that we are lost in this world, a world Kocher's compelling and often searingly tender voice speaks from. Here, our most private moments are connected to the most distant and public--from the dream of a lost lover in the form of a white crane woven inextricably with a Peruvian earthquake in ‘Long Arm Forward,’ down to the quietest single image in ‘At Home the People Sing’ where language itself remains 'a doorway, to remind us our lives/ are not a pain we dream/ to remind us we are alive.' When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, is, in short, a very wise, beautiful and moving book."

–Beckian Fritz Goldberg

"In When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, Ruth Ellen Kocher is remarkably attuned to 'the overture of the object,' the intimate disclosures of rain, bougainvillea, sweet carrot. Unlike the sister who 'doesn't say' in Kocher's beautiful 'Sestina Mouths the Object, the Word,' the poet carries us away in a language that, like water, can be moved by 'an object/that has broken the surface.' In the dark lake of this poem, it may be 'the two oars...who were lovers' that strike a reader, or elsewhere, 'the keels' of a girl's hands before she'd understood 'her own body, the warm cove keen to growing things...' Overture, aperture. I think anyone opening this book will discover 'the singular way inanimate things come to love us/by giving us back some of ourselves.'"

–Allison Funk

Praise for Desdemona's Fire
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"At the heart of these stunning poems is a precise and imaginative examination of the thin line that separates beauty and terror, wisdom and madness, tolerance and hatred."

–Bruce Weigl

From Foreword Magazine
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January, 2002
By Sandy McKinney

Expect another award for poetry whose imagery revels in color: “this month/ will always have a man in red pants/ and a new blue shirt” emotional intensity: “his head hung so low/ shoulder blades become wings/ threatening to burst through his back” and, in poem after poem, an intimacy with natural history: “we walked a mile to bury this blue fish [which] now ... with its small brain/ dead soft with parasites and wearing/ death’s humble gray would feed the earth again.”

Kocher’s subject matter is refreshingly varied, the emotional tone drifting from languid, through building, to outrage. Her use of enjambment functions like a brickbat, designed not merely to invite but to stun the reader on to the next line: “She has the terrible love of the praying/ mantis, this girl...”

More fun than almost anything else is the way this intrepid poet, dealing with the giddy shenanigans of nature, gaily thumbs her nose at the pathetic fallacy: “I can tell you that the grass sorrows/ if there is no thunder or the earth shudders/ where people sleep or the mountains mouth/ their wishes silently into snow.”

It’s a slim collection, divided into three sections. Throughout the twelve poems in the first section, “Lost and Leaving”, the majority of both situations and dramatis personae seem “made up.” However, they are made up of an evocative combination of imagination and the memory remnants of a lifetime of keen observation. One poem, “The Escape Artist” is a tour de force of extended metaphor which ends: “You are waiting for the miracle?/ You are waiting for the slim/ left hand, for the right hand, fingers/ that find their own way out of cool/ confinement. You are free.”

The middle section, “Home” moves from the dramatic to the community, beginning with “At Home the People Sing”, a signal poem combining a tender affection for the folkways of her native community and a chilling recognition of the persistence of bondage: “a small country ... the sun/ hard enough/ to hurt them, their black/ black skin composing a thirst for songs/ to build a grief/ that will stun the snakes, pucker/ the beans, remember the exact width/ of hallways before the first creaking board.”

The final section, “Wars Away” is pure lament, a catalogue of the infinite ways in which the peril of living in a body is compensated by a compassion felt and given, a hard-earned celebration of the specificity of being human. It’s a fitting finale for 28 poems which sing in a voice wavering through grief to triumph in the clear syllables of love.

—Sandy McKinney