"The poetry of Stephen Dunn helps make the landscape of all of our lives more livable -- quietly, unobtrusively, he has taken his place among our major, indispensable poets."
    -- Miami Herald

"To read a few lines of a Stephen Dunn poem is to feel suddenly in touch with the way things are, and the way we really feel about them."
    -- Richard Wilbur

"Stephen Dunn writes of the 'mysterious world of women/and men, of momentary/common agreement and wild misunderstanding.' He makes extraordinary poems of ordinary lives, his poetry conscious that it cannot save the lives about which it writes. The insignificant, in his anecdotes, becomes significant; as he sketches his 'landscape at the end of the century,' things which are normally concealed, even in intimacy, begin to appear and grow perceptible -- the obsessions, hopes, and despairs of the secret life in everyman. In spare, plain-spoken poems he utters the silence in him which prompts his offered speech."
    -- Academy Award in Literature statement

"The art lies in hiding the art, Horace tells us, and Stephen Dunn has proven himself a master of concealment. His honesty would not be so forceful were it not for his discrete formality; his poems would not be so strikingly naked were they not so carefully dressed."
    -- Billy Collins

"If it is wisdom that Stephen Dunn's poems are about... then wisdom is something a little different from we might have supposed. It might be something we could only learn through a language like his, unbearably fearless and beautiful."
    -- Gerald Stern

"It is a poetry that probes the hidden shoals and depths of daily life, that touches into them, and with deft and warm technically brilliant voices reveals the splendors of our anguish, the wisdom of our love."
    -- C.K. Williams