“Stricker’s SENTIENCE is a radical expression of loving solidarity with Being, nature’s unbounded ground. Fulfilling the literal premise of ecopoetry, oikos and poiesis, these poems fashion a home ‘at the non-carceral edge of dreams’ where man-made boundaries dissolve: ‘your interior my interior the wilderness’ interior inside a word.’ Hers is a politics of an ensouled world where ‘language is/both inside/and outside the body/intra-species, polyphonic.’ This is visionary work, its ecstasy derived from the gnosis of delving ever more deeply into ecological relation, its grief an outcome of bearing witness to relation’s devastation.”

Brian Teare, author of "Poem Bitten by a Man"

“The poems in Stricker’s ‘Hazardous Materials’ series rest on a bedrock of notation. The borrowed lines from varied sources: Kafka, Coleridge, Dickinson, Benjamin, Bill Viola, to list only a few are sometimes used as epigraphs, sometimes as scaffolding, and frequently as echoes that argue that all utterance is interconnected. While the poems traffic in lyric beauty, it’s never at the cost of pretending the real world with its real ruin doesn’t exist: oil spills and waste water infused with prescription drug residues, ‘that rawness, the mess/ the Veiling of beauty//lost in twigs, ‘cured’ of language, unfinished and starry.’ I have great confidence in these poems, in their inclusivity and their formal reach. Language is never more than a fractured mirror of world but these poems come closer than most to capturing the complexity of what is in front of us.”

Mary Jo Bang, from the judge's citation for the Iowa Review Poetry prize, on work included in "SENTIENCE"

“Stricker’s brilliant SENTIENCE gives us the architectures of the page as a Muschampian museum in our mind, a paradise for saying and seeing. The language and the form are as keenly wound as the honeycomb housing bees. Saying, here, also proclaims loss. Seeing comes in Deleuze/Guattari-like frames, sometimes indexical, sometimes asymmetrical, all rhizomic. Word and image become entanglements where science, dream, and destruction must be witnessed, downloaded, then actionized. With masterful poetic pacing, Stricker’s collection accelerates on a neogothic-modern event plane from one page to another and one mind-space to another with an auditory generational resonance. Stricker flames our discontent by summoning Beuys as a fiction-maker and Shelley as the imagist inventor of the inferno of human nature. On whole, SENTIENCE is a love song for survivors, an argument for the soul. For Stricker, beauty dwells in words as if isomers could say, see, and name. SENTIENCE burns with a call for a collective performance, an exchange of awe in praise of lyrical resistance.”

Cydney Payton, curator-at-large, former director and chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver

“Stricker’s SENTIENCE is a poetic embodiment that intersects creatives from across literary and philosophical disciplines, while inviting readers to imagine how the imagination might encompass more than we ever conceived. Her language is being itself, while simultaneously being a language we all think, feel and experience. It is a wonder how she can navigate through invisible universes that makes one feel nostalgic. Her eloquent ’magic-ifs’ leads us to ask if anyone has ever envisioned how the political is as much spiritual as it is not? This collection clearly demonstrates hers is a singular voice echoing the many ‘we’s’ each of us contains.”

 

George Emilio Sanchez, writer and artist