“Hilda Raz has an appetite for the pleasures of touch, sight, love; an openness to the wounds of life and the ‘common face’ of death; a capacity for language that captures the weather and the details of a place and time, a day, the changes of a lifetime. The poetry of What Happens mirrors ‘our great and perfect / need,’ along with myths, riddles, and ‘everything possible blooming.’”
“Hilda Raz’s poetic diction is always immediate and direct, engaging the reader. She achieves special intensity in her depiction of the human body, its vulnerability, and its capacity for pleasure (see ‘Friend in a Distant City’ and ‘Pain’). Here is a poet at the height of her formidable powers to move and inspire.”—Robert Pack, author of Still Here, Still Now
“Underneath ‘ordinary stars and a late moon,’ extraordinary things happen to the people in Hilda Raz’s poems. Love transforms, bodies transform, health transforms, and looked at freshly, the things we thought we knew burst into strangeness. There is nothing like Raz’s charged, smart, profound, moving poems, so rich in both intellect and heart, so open and wise, provoked by the question ‘how can we live properly?’”—Floyd Skloot, author of The Wink of the Zenith
“A moving, still fresh, collection of poetry.”—Linda Read Deeds, Nebraska Life
“These are emotionally taut poems, created by the poet to share herself or, perhaps, her many selves with the world at her feet.”—Charles Stephen, Lincoln Journal Star
