The Lord and the General Din of the World
"There is a mood--connected to solitude--that is not loneliness and not despair, but that feels like it could turn into either if you did not try to love the world, or at least look at it attentively. This book seems written from that place. It's a book to be read slowly and quietly, if you are to feel your way into its deep sadness and its small, sudden well of joy." –Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World
“Mead pinpoints, and gives form to, tenuous, seemingly nameless emotions (""Somewhere there should be a place/ the exact shape of my emptiness-/ there should be a place/ responsible for taking one back""). That precision gives her poetry, though often spawned of rough subject-matter (addiction, abuse, suicide and profound isolation), the power of expertly cut gems.”
— Publishers Weekly
“Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful.”
— American Book Review