Deborah Larsen

"I learned about Ricci in 1963 when as an undergraduate I took a Far East history course; I was immediately enamored of this courageous, canny man and of the country that was China. In 1985 I read Jonathan D. Spence’s astonishing The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and this book rekindled for me the image of the strange, brilliant, sympathetic figure with whom I had been fascinated."

"Remarkable and enchanting. The originality of its conception and execution is brilliant, and beneath that brilliance lie mysterious depths."
"Poetry's a narrow saddle in which readers often shift their weight. While we sometimes accuse autobiographical poems of having too limited a sphere, we just as often claim fictional and biographical ones leave readers feeling manipulated by artifice (as though the poet gussied up an otherwise pedestrian imagination with stolen flourishes). It is a rare volume that can make someone else's life feel heartfelt and necessary, but this is the magnificent balance offered by Deborah Larsen's first collection."