Ragpicking Ezekiel's Bones

Pamela Sumners' work draws the reader into a very personal space with a fine-tuned and musical sense of rhythm in her lines. I'm often surprised by her poetry as she delves into these deeper connections with a quiet passion and grateful that as a reader, I'm offered the opportunity to join her. -Mare Heron Hake, Poetry Editor, Tahoma Literary Review

All the world's a poem for Pamela Sumners. In Ragpicking Ezekiel's Bones she practices what might be called "the poetics of inclusion." How to get everything in . . .is the challenge she sets for herself, and Ragpicking is all the proof I require that she is way more than up to that challenge. Sumners' work is "immodest," in the highest and best sense of the word, and ambitious, an increasingly rare virtue in an age of small poems. She writes "large" poems, poems that "contain multitudes." She manages, somehow, to get all manner of folks into them, and all her "folk" have stories to tell, stories motivated by desire, by "urgency and longing"-the same motivation that readers should bring to her book. The reward for such readers of Ragpicking Ezekiel's Bones will be memorable, even indelible, lines and whole poems that will not let you leave them, that will stay with you and stay with you, all your life."-William Slaughter, editor of Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics and author of The Politics of My Heart and Untold Stories

Sumners'. . .words start warm, pour on a disturbing heat, then spill blood before looping back into a cool, almost arctic end. . . . Just take care that you don't get hurt.-Sunshots/New Millennium

The great thing about Pamela Sumners' poetry is that it takes you to unexpected places-away from the cliched and predictable. Her subjects are many and various; her treatment of them is individual. This is poetry for people who think.-George Simmers, Editor, Snakeskin Poetry Blog