"Denise Thompson-Slaughter's poems celebrate the sound and sense of those elements that form an authentic life, that make us both beast and believer, bound to this world and yet longing for the heavens. In Elemental, she puts her 'best ear forward/And what I hear...makes my heart...blaze in its dark cage'; and we don't mind inhabiting that imagination, even when 'death arrives in a cloak as kind as silk/where we had expected sack cloth.' With careful attention to her perceived world, she gives us a 'focus of sounds...to comprehend this place/well enough to move through it/with some grace.'"
Charles Coté
Author of Flying for the Window