Other Times, Midnight is the perfect companion for difficult times: "Once upon a time it was not a fine day." But, wait! Reading Andrea Ballou's markedly distraught debut volume is so fun! With candor honed by clarity, these poems gallop through a story of breakage, with imagery crackling like light driven through shattered stained-glass. But the best part of reading this book is the humor, which is drawn through its poems like the "dark thread" an unsympathetic voice notes "run[s] through the cloth of your family." Ballou's brusque retort says it all: "Yes I know this thread it is crimson."  

-- Cate Marvin

I've been following Andrea Ballou's poetry for many years now and have been consistently amazed by the way she creates, as if from air, such vivid narratives, such rich and complex expressions of family drama, of love and loss and yearning. With wit, economy of language, emotional nuance, and fine intelligence, her work arrives fully formed and glorious. What a remarkable first book Other Times, Midnight is. 

-- Kevin Prufer

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