“In Fracas & Asylum, her third collection, Raab emerges as a poet of mature accomplishment, one who has come fully awake to her vocation. The mythic landscapes of her northern California childhood still resonate with dark beauty, while her themes have widened and opened outward. . . Her language is playful, even mischievous at times, always surprising and original. In her formal daring and thematic breadth, Raab bears witness to much that is broken and awry in the world and labors in her poetry toward a restoration of wholeness.” 

–Jean Nordhaus, The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelsohn and other books

“The language of Zara Raab’s Fracas & Asylum moves in a loose, jazzy relationship with meter, or syllabics, and rhyme. The content of this complex, fascinating book—which ranges from introspection and autobiography—or perhaps persona poems—through botany, painting, life deep in the sea or in the air—also plays sinuously against the world.  At one pole this is a poetry of wit and nuance, at the other, often where the poems slope suddenly off, begin to echo, Raab brings us into touch with brute fact, the actual.”      -Richard Silberg, teacher, poet, The Horses and Deconstruction of the Blues

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