“Beth Roberts’ poems are en route and restless, glimpsing, as they do, “what it is the century requires.” Such glimpses take hard work with a steadying lens and the willingness to stop abruptly, to implicate oneself in the brief, severe clarity that a lens frames. Throughout her impressive first collection, Roberts fights to keep the fine synaptical snap of perception alive amidst the world’s relentless desire for “ a long attenuating history.” Of course, to count the cost of true sight and the worth of our hours requires a stubborn belief in language, that “spectrum of decision” she calls it. It is her original and serious play with this spectrum’s wide swerves, its echoes and vortices, seductions and groundings, that compels readers to believe as well.”

–Lia Purpura