"One cannot imagine the late Raymond Carver as a first baseman, or as financier, or as Cromwell's foreign secretary," wrote Lee Oser in World Literature Today. "His writing explores a narrow bandwidth in the spectrum of human life, and his world is a place of limitations." Carver-land is one in which characters are "incarcerated by time and circumstance, but whose dreary lives are occasionally ignited by moments of startling clarity," according to a contributor for Publishers Weekly in a review of his posthumous collected poems, All of Us. Carver, both poet and short story writer, "massaged a career from material little more suggestive than pocket litter," declared Lyall Bush in a review of the story collection Short Cuts in Studies in Short Fiction: "funny-to-appalling monologues and dialogues where dead-end depression meets Man Ray-esque juxtapositions of the ugly and exhilarating." But that description is only one part of the Carver that has become known from short story collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please" and What We Talk about When We Talk of Love.
