His poetry moves with seeming casualness and ease, and it deftly opens deep and complex issues of identity—identity explored in the dimensions of race, family, generation, sex, psychology, and religion.... [an] impressive first book.

—THE HUDSON REVIEW

Precise and controlled, these poems have wit and intelligence: they are never sentimental or arch. Empathy and love pervade them: one feels throughout them that father, mother, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles, grandparents and elders, and ancestors have equal claims to be heard. And this, far from being a burden, is the source of the poems' great wisdom: for if all these souls in the continuum of souls have a right to be heard, so does the son and poet.

—AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW

PRAISE FOR MIDDLE EAR

For Hamer, the middle ear serves as a metaphor for and gives shape to the imagination. In many of these poems, the imagination fills the gaps left in perception by faulty senses.... Hamer eloquently captures this process of sensory translation over and over in these poems, the imagination sketched in motion.

—ELECTRONIC POETRY REVIEW