Reviews of Perfect Disappearance
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"Perfect Disappearance is the record––so far––of an odd, courageous, and very gifted consciousness, whose witness I admire with all my heart."

––Jean Valentine

"It might be the wind; it might be a whim from within the self or from some powerful other, but suddenly the world is rendered profoundly unstable in these haunted and haunting poems. We encounter a sense of jeopardy all the more unsettling for the poet's linguistic control and astute, shaping intelligence. As if all the gifts of poetic ordering are only just adequate to the dark that animated the poems (and the world). We are placed squarely and powerfully in an intimate version of Rilke's vision of beauty as 'nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear.'"

––Gregory Orr

"Rhodes' allusiveness is grouded in the psychological symbolism of deep-image poetry rather than the intertextuality of postmodernism. She uses dreams, dreams of ghosts, and dreamlike symbols: a house, the wind, and a bridge between the living and the dead, dream and reality, memory and imagination. These symbols represent the poet, and the poet's relationship to experience. Rhodes writes about her experience, but even as she uses disruptive and transgressive images, she does not rhetorically dramatize her experience. Instead, where what she represents is her self, she foregrounds the notion that representation does violence to what is represented."

––Catherine Daly, from her review in Frigate

“Rhodes’s poems: crisp, precise, erotic language, anchored in place but adrift in consciousness, the metaphysical like a valence cloud enveloping the physical, elusive and illusive all at the same time.”

–– Vince Gotera, North American Review

Praise for At the Gate (Provincetown Arts Press, 1995)
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". . . These short poems, by turns savage, wry, mordantly witty, tender, stern, deluded, sane, read like a series of fragments, bits of mosaic; they duplicate on the page a sense of the past's being, piece by piece, recovered; they convey, devastatingly, the moment of a pattern's emerging: the little scenes and vignettes, the suspect tools of memory, cohere heart-stoppingly and absolutely into a narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart. . ."

–– Louise Glück, from 'The Forbidden,' Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco Press)