Longlisted: Raymond Souster Award

“If I could make a shelter to cover my human skin, in the forest maybe, to dream, the pages of this book would be every needed thing to vibrate anew. Ali Blythe writes the kind of poems I always want in my life, a laser focus dancing down the page! Blythe is the Nijinsky of poetry for our precarious world, ‘one myth / dissolving within / another, risking / our own nihility.’” — CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return

“Stedfast is one of those books that reminds me why I love poetry. ‘Each new day is cut / from the key of the last;’ if the same is true of each new poem, here’s a set of gleaming keys cut from Keats’s sonnet. Where Keats’s bright star shines stedfastly, Blythe’s star offers an unsteady light. Instead of longing for constancy, the lyric ‘I’ of Stedfast loves and desires within the quivering here and now — and the poignancy of this love gives me all the feels.” — Sue Sinclair, author of Almost Beauty

“For some the lyric poem can approach great unanswerable questions, but does such a poem divine the answer or conjure it, summon it from darkness? I found myself very attuned to the lines of Ali Blythe; so carefully tuned, they go beyond human knowledge and into the forest of wild knowledges.” — Kazim Ali, author of Sukun

“Just like the two asterisks on a blank page, ‘two figures continue / their delicate revolutions,’ or an unsteady star, Stedfast is a slow burn that leaves a mark.” — British Columbia Review

“Blythe skillfully adopts canonical poetry to craft remarkable images and elegant insights into love and the art of verse.” — Miramichi Reader