Praise for Salt Moon

Reviews

"A daring sensibility combined with an omnivorous curiosity and a thorough but lightly worn mastery of craft combine to make her prize-winning Salt Moon as fine a book of poetry as has appeared in years."

— Tim McBride, Browse
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"Salt Moon stands in witness to the grand accumulation of histories, however they might be recorded: human and non-human, written and instinctual, cruel and kind. Its impressions becoming, undoing, and reconfiguring with laser-like poise the landscape to which it bends and from which it rises."

— Laurie Saurborn, American Microreviews
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"Noel Crook brings what she sees and remembers to vivid light in a skillful and natural way with perfectly managed lines."

— Peter Makuck, Tar River Poetry
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Advance Praise

"Wise blood throbs in the veins of these poems, and wild song lilts through each line.  From Carolina woods to Texas canyons, from motherhood to slaughter, Noel Crook's Salt Moon startles with its reach and gratifies with its depth. Don't miss this exquisite book." 

—Barbara Ras, author of The Last Skin

"I feel carried away by these rapturously perfect poems. Hold any line or stanza in your mind – it bears the exact weight, energy and detail needed to create the scenes and worlds inhabiting this most potent, tender collection."

—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer

"Crook’s concerns are dark and weighty. But hers is a fiercely resilient voice, aware of its own 'black capacities' for survival—and equally unmistakable the beauty she finds for us in the 'butcher knife that fits the palm like an answer.' Salt Moon is an important debut, a finely made, courageous book." 

—Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife

"Morally complex, syntactically dexterous, these brave poems simultaneously consider the past and future in images that both lacerate and reconcile. Crook merges worlds—white sun, white moon—in poems whose yearning leads us back and forth from stars to nearer fires."

— Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

"Crook gives us close-ups of overwhelming desire, deepest tenderness, terror, and stunned love. Salt Moon ranges wide, taking us through contradictory landscapes into instantly recognizable human frailty and bravery. And all of it is singing."

—Betty Adcock, author of Intervale: New and Selected Poems

"The voice in these poems is authentic...a wise observer earning the reader's trust from the outset, sly, dark and lovely in its speech. I always knew her first book would be a stunner."

—John Balaban, author of Locusts at the Edge of Summer

"Even more than the many fine lyrical portraits of family and relationship, memory and obsession, it's the harsh Texas landscape that inhabits these poems—its scrub oaks and coyotes, parched canyons and birds of prey. I'm drawn in by these tight lines packed with images, their clipped narratives and spiky rhythms. This is a compelling debut collection."

—Joseph Millar, author of Blue Rust