“Kocher (Ending in Planes) takes a cue from T.S. Eliot’s essay “The Three Voices of Poetry” as she utilizes the third voice—of a dramatic character—to thread history and the present. Sinking into the uncomfortable truths of her characters, Kocher uses these voices—including those of Richard Pryor, Paul Robeson, Pearl Bailey, and Eartha Kitt—as a means of challenging racism and exposing its changing reflection, whether it manifests as a grotesque caricature or a psychic wounding. Kocher mixes instructions on the running of a minstrel show with short skits featuring fictional women with names such as Lacy N. Igga and historical figures such as Malcolm X. In “[No Saints] One Act,” the poetic “I” is replaced with the poetic “You,” with the self becoming another character: “If you spoke to the voice in your head you could finally understand but would discover a different language.” There’s a lot to process in this collection, but the language is rich, deep, lyrical, and engaging enough to support the reader through the complexity of the presentation. The dramatic voices that operate throughout act as a reminder that history is a fragmented reality with many angles, not simply a linear series of indisputable facts.” —Publishers Weekly

“Taking T. S. Eliot’s idea of the ‘third’ or dramatic persona speaking to another invented persona, Ruth Ellen Kocher conjures a cast of nine speakers who ‘perform’ a series of prose poems. The nineteenth-century minstrel show provides the venue for these characters, whose language and subject matter contrast with ‘sampled’ language Kocher appropriates from philosophy texts and minstrel manuals. Passages from these manuals (‘How to Stage a Minstrel Show,’ and ‘New Jokes for Female Minstrels’) reveal the racist stereotyping that undergirds early American vaudeville and burlesque—and, by inference, all liberal and performing arts. Into this history, through prose poems, Kocher brings African American civil rights martyrs (Martin Luther King Jr., Emmett Till, Malcolm X), performing artists (Pearl Bailey, Eartha Kitt, Richard Pryor, Sun Ra), and cultural icons (W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson).” — Robin Becker, “(In)justice of the Place: Design and Pattern in Contemporary Political Poetry,” The Georgia Review