“Like someone who has thoroughly explored and mapped a haunted terrain but then discovers or cuts a path into further fields, Alyda Faber exhausts the possibilities of her remarkable premise, then somehow uncovers even more riches. This collection is crammed with rewards.” — Steven Heighton
“In an effort to apprehend what it is to be a daughter, Alyda Faber draws myriad likenesses of her strong-willed and loving mother through those objects or obsessions that bring her to life. With a gaze as emotive and focused as Frida Kahlo’s, Faber has assembled a retrospective of still lives and maternal history paintings by employing a poetic line that is at times a turbulent impasto and at others the calm crosshatchings of a pencil sketch.” — John Barton
“Each poem in Poisonous If Eaten Raw is a portrait and an ecosystem that makes meaning from memory and of a relationship that is the origin of longing and is singular to each of us. How do we make sense of our mothers? The pain they endured, the pain they created? This is a poet pushing past memory into a present and deeper understanding that’s brimming with empathy and a way forward. And this is remembering in motion: vivid and audacious, moving into and out from its source.” — Sue Goyette
“The cumulative miracle of this book is nothing short of a complex maternal absence made present — unretouched, tense, triumphantly seen.” — Julie Bruck
“Her language is precise and concise, both apt and original — ‘admirably idiosyncratic,’ to quote the book’s cover blurb — two qualities that are not easily combined.” — The New Quarterly
“Faber’s work is exquisite ... a product of real courage, and an unequivocal success.” — periodicities
“There is no way for a daughter to know her mother as anyone other than a mother. But in Poisonous if Eaten Raw, Faber creates evocative portraits that attempt to bridge this gap of knowing through a process of surreal re-imagination.” — The Fiddlehead
“With her visceral and compassionate imagery, Faber evokes a responsiveness in the reader and a flexibility of mind and heart.” — Dalhousie Review
