PRAISE FOR CALL AND RESPONSE
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