“…vibrant, cut-shining poems…” Virginia McClure

“Caroline Beasley-Baker is her voice, working the faults and facets like a jeweler, but with language. She makes parallels collide, no easy trick that.” Bob Holman

“In Caroline Beasley-Baker's ‘For Lack of Diamond Years’, the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins presides over a series of short poems and mesostics that are both luminous and fiercely original. The poet herself invokes Hopkins in both her envoi and in the titles of her poems; each title contains a caesura in the form of a slash (e.g. “sea-shanty/iceland”). This is not to say that Beasley-Baker is merely imitating Hopkins. Rather, she has embraced his sprung rhythm and then altered it to produce a voice and meter that are purely her own. There is a resonance to her work, and a recognition that the everyday contains within it the possibility of transcendence, of enlightenment, of change…” Wendy Galgan, Bibliotekos

“[Beasley-Baker's] poetry digs even deeper, it strikes me as what art historians are now calling sfogo (Italian for steam), the little musings to oneself that accompanies the making of a work of art; a kind of nonstop texting-below-texting that the mind in metacognitive itch continues on with as it will. Not the lecturey talkback run-on that keeps one from getting to sleep, but the dream-phrasings that incant over walks in the cold or in the dark—or being in the flow of making art.
…It’s really very rare, for a visual artist to so completely translate or, more precisely, transcribe her visual sense into words. For this reason, for me, Beasley-Baker's poems are a significant achievement” Robert J. Mahoney, The The Poetry

“The poet has a keen sense of how to evoke emotion through each of the senses, filling all seventy-seven poems with rich, vivid imagery and language. Though the poems are all short, they are packed with substance. One could read through the book in several minutes, yet each poem begs to be pored over multiple times. There is a certain playful juxtaposition surrounding Beasley-Baker's poetry. One poem about longing is painted with citrine and silver; ruby red, dayglo blush, and cornflower blue decorate a lowly concubine in another. The chaos of the universe in the poem ‘yang/black hole among circle & flow’ is juxtaposed against the child's nursery rhyme ‘Row, Row, Row, Your Boat,’ invoked by memory. Uncovering meanings and idiosyncrasiesis a pleasure, and upon each re-reading new gems are discovered. Young adults will enjoy the philosophical questions asked within the poems, as this technique encourages open-ended thought and conversation, a nonrestrictive form that can be easily appreciated. Lovers of poetry will delight in Beasley-Baker's unique style and vision. With pushing, those with a poetry aversion may be won over for no other reason than to revel in the manipulation of words on the page.” Lindsay Grattan, Voices of Young Adults (VOYA)