CITED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF THE 10 BEST POETRY BOOKS OF 2018
“The prospect of a book filled with prose poems is admittedly better than the prospect of a book filled with thumbtacks, but not by much. So it is greatly to Stonecipher’s credit that Transaction Histories is a delight: a mordant yet romantic survey of art, love, hunger and plastic owls in which seemingly unrelated observations are meticulously knit together to form a resonant whole. The method here is generally to put a figure or phrase in play — for example, a little girl who “turned out to have just one wish for her tenth birthday: an entire box of fortune cookies to herself” — and then to move immediately away from it, only to return again later in an altered context that forms the poetic equivalent of a chord (several pages later, the girl and her fortune cookies return as a counterpoint to a man who “felt most at home in airports”).” —David Orr, The New York Times
“With her new book, Transaction Histories, Donna Stonecipher cements her reputation as master of the prose poem. But the book also offers an opportunity to introduce Stonecipher, one of the most important poets working now, to a broader reading public. Issues of cosmopolitanism and displacement have long occupied Stonecipher’s work and now, with the current turn in world politics, possess renewed urgency. —Bonnie Costello, Boston Review
“Stonecipher’s ability to synthesize the visceral (corset), the ephemeral (splendor), and the abstract (grammar) into a self-sufficient sentence set her apart from her contemporaries: this was neither a style that could be picked up nor writing that could be taught. . . . In poem after poem, Stonecipher opens up a space in which readers can reflect upon what has been placed before them—a mosaic that is rigorous and elusive, a challenge to keep the whole in mind while remembering all the distinct elements, to recognize different transactions or exchanges in the fluid world she evokes with preternatural precision. At once detached and empathetic, Stonecipher observes, uncovers, and probes our present malaise, the recognition that the future and past are constantly colliding in our everyday lives, shadowed by the suspicion that such encounters may erase all evidence of our existence.” —John Yau, Hyperallergic
“Today’s Book of Poetry always wants to like the books we receive. Stonecipher gave us no choice. . . . Stonecipher’s foot never comes off the gas, the deeper you go into Transaction Histories the more intimately things are revealed. At times, it feels as though Stonecipher is trying to emotionally engineer some sort of new and beautiful language, a whole new template.” —Today’s Book of Poetry