"To open the pages of Alyda Faber's Dust or Fire is to embark on a questing journey into the fragmentary elusiveness of family history, the threatened survival of Frisian — the language of Friesland — and the precariousness of life itself. along the way, the reader is repeatedly left breathless by the shimmering images and the intricately clever metaphoric wordplay Faber wields in her remarkably accomplished debut poetry collection." — Ruth Roach Pierson
"Family and its aftermath, how to honour the devastation and save the girl? Circling around her parents' meeting in a Frisian train station, Alyda Faber, at turns austere and lyric, elliptical and direct, zeroes in on love and fear until the atom splits. She gifts us with some of the best writing about family by a Canadian poet in many years." — John Barton