“This volume rightly secures [Stone's] status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three.” —Harvard Review [on What Love Comes To]

“At an age when many are merely repeating themselves, Ruth Stone has taken on new themes and images, created with both a seer’s eye and the eye of social witness. Of remembered love, loss, and poverty she writes with such a force of intelligence and compassionate dispassion that even the most humble, commonplace things inhabit a world made strange, lucid, luminous. In the Next Galaxy gives us the unflinching vision of a woman well into her eighties, fully inhabiting body and mind, writing poems that are vital and eloquent distillations of experience.” —2002 National Book Award Judges

"Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound. But never pompous. Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly, without all the detritus of social convention the rest of us pick up along the way . . . Her writing proves her to be simply inspired." —USA Today [on Simplicity]