“There’s a restlessness to Lily Mackenzie’s poetry that might properly be called “curiosity” — the eye alert in its socket, the ear straining to register. “The vaults of syllables” pour out their riches: a delectation of sky, a rampage of color, the sweet sting of mortality. From Mendocino to the Sea of Marmara to the Mexican highlands, these poems are afoot in the Whitman sense, and wonderfully “chewy” — deeply figured and sonically dense. Or let’s say they sink their teeth into experience, lap it right up, “night splitting/ open and spilling// its milk.” In other words, what we have here is poetic sustenance.” Aaron Schurin, Former Academic Director for the University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is a recipient of California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in poetry (1989, 2002), and a NEA fellowship in creative nonfiction (1995). Shurin is the former Associate Director of the Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University and the author of numerous books of poetry and prose.

“The poems in Lily Iona McKenzie’s All This are an engrossing atlas of both geographical and emotional landscapes. They move from Canada to California, from the body to bereavement, from poetry to politics, from loss to love and back again. These innovative poems resonate because, miraculously, their topographies feel both familiar and new. We love living in them.” Dean Rader, former Associate Dean of Arts & Sciences and current professor of English at the University of San Francisco. He has published widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, judged by Claudia Keelan. In 2009, Kelly Cherry selected his poem “Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934” for the prestigious Sow's Ear Review Prize and in 2008, his poem "Frog Loses Sleep Puzzling Over Parallel Universes" won the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize.