“In Perennial Fall, distinct, hard-edged images create a haunting counter-play of distortion, troubled insight or menace. The simultaneous clarity and shadow has the quality of a dream that can be neither forgotten nor settled. The disturbed speaker of the final, audacious dramatic monologue articulates in its most extreme form Maggie Dietz’s sense of the uncanny forces under life’s surface. Her achievement—and the source of excitement for her readers—is an urgent fidelity to both that surface and the underlying caves and rivers of the imagination."

Robert Pinsky

“Graced with a subtlety of vision and formal versatility that bring Bishop and Bogan quickly to mind, Maggie Dietz’s Perennial Fall both embodies and enacts the trajectory from being haunted by loss, to accepting the fact of it, to refusing a life that doesn’t include ‘dusk, dying, [and] ends.’ ‘I love/this world, my heart is/here, where a body breathes,’ says Dietz, reluctant to know an afterlife where there’s ‘Nothing to tend,/nothing you’re up against.’ Dietz speaks with the hard-won authority of one ‘who’s lost, who’s lost someone’ and has learned that to love and suffer is to have lived fully, and with eyes wide open. These poems are the stirring record of such a life, and the welcome announcement of a masterful new voice in American poetry.”

Carl Phillips | Carl Philips

“Perennial Fall is a first book of unusual delicacy and precision of feeling, and masterful economy, even starkness of presentation. I admire the poise in these lines, which is a moral and psychological balance, charged with ambiguity, ripe for disturbance. The human beings in Dietz’s poems have a participatory relation to the nature that surrounds them, and human nature in her world is brave and permeable: ‘Among the welcome elements not one/thing did not hunger to be changed.’ These poems are, themselves, welcome elements in a crowded and noisy world.”

Rosanna Warren | Rosanna Wareen

"[Maggie Dietz]’s got plenty of attitude, as well as skill to back it up....[Her] lippy candor is invigorating in a wish-I’d-thought-of-that way, and it’s a pleasure to be led through her world as she looks at familiar subjects with fresh eyes....Intimate, idiomatic and thoroughly original."

David Kirby | New York Times Book Review

"Once you are invited in, it is difficult to walk out unchanged, to ignore the sense that this fall to which Dietz refers is not simply seasonal, but also a commentary on humanity--its loves, its losses, its own perpetual waiting."

Aimee Pozorski | Cold Mountain Review