Reviews of Purr

“The texture and shape of the world, described so vividly as to bring eyesight to the blind. And the Eliotesque mutterings, the stage whispers, the blips of the overheard and the internal musings of the mind. Here is a poetry built of sensory data so sharply honed as to make even the mundane microfibre or the quotidian stone path a journey, a finding, a deep understanding of the world. And who couldn't love a book where Doris Day and Nancy Sinatra are as essential and as mysterious as saints?”

—D.A. Powell

“If you lower the volume on the usual poetry noises and tune your intelligence to the exquisite frequencies of Mary Ann Samyn’s third book, Purr, you will hear the contemporary. ‘Then language finished, and set me down. / I had been performed. I had been emptied,’ she writes and, as is so often the case in this dazzling collection, the poetry hovers between irony and true despair. Nuance and variety infuses these pages. This is poetry that is hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new. Don’t read it at your peril.”

—Lynn Emanuel

"Her sense of humor is evident throughout and instead of making fun of or mocking an intent, it serves to accentuate the difficulty of trying to express/communicate/illuminate anything through language."

—Anna Eyre, Traffic

Reviews of Inside the Yellow Dress

"Mary Ann Samyn's originality and intelligent energy, so evident in Captivity Narrative, continue here to spark their mysterious questions and longings. I admire hugely this poetry's humors and sorrows, the wild thoughtfulness, the risks."

––Jean Valentine

"One of Mary Ann Samyn's poems asserts in its title "A little splendor is nice," and yet the splendors of this book are large, and nice as they are, they are also terrifying. This is a book about expectations, about not having any, and about how the language gives us more than we deserve anyway: 'Her mouth is, moving toward / everything.' Everything is just about right to describe the scope of this voice, this amazing book by one of our truly significant poets."

––Bin Ramke

“Samyn’s poems are not quite all there—they remind me of Hugh Kenner’s statement about Pound’s take on Sappho, writing poems that feel as if half the parchment has been ripped off—Samyn’s poems are elliptical in a strangely intimate sense, as if they are inaccessibly hermetic yet vibrate electrically because of her knack in slipping the reader into her poem… Samyn’s book is a significant feminist statement at the same time that it is an intensely personal document. ”

––Vince Gotera, North American Review

In Praise of Captivity Narrative:

"Cryptic yet lucid, anguished yet calm, Mary Ann Samyn's amazing poems hover as near the unsayable lyric center as language can come––that place where self and imagination spin on a single axis and send off their startling flurry of sparks."

––Gregory Orr

"Beauty bites in, mystery sings, in Captivity Narrative. The poems are about the facets of being and evoke a world both dreamlike and natural. Mary Ann Samyn knows how to give voice to the dislocations of spirit, imagining a wilderness and 'the thrill of ransom.' I marvel at the range of original sensibility. What a brilliant book."

––Carol Frost