Instructions to the Double is a book about what Tess Gallagher calls the "true disguises" of the world, the way the world addresses us and what we see and hear instead. The poems are full of doubles: shadows, reflections in eyes and water and mirrors, resemblances ("Your neck, so / like hers", "each moon so like a moon"), photographs, a body's impression burnt onto bedsprings in a fire. These doubles attest to a hidden, static quality in what happens—i...

[In Instructions to the Double, Under Stars, and On Your Own, Tess Gallagher] consistently reaches into fresh, often startling reservoirs of experience and comes up with original, lucid verses. I am most impressed by the wide variety of subjects that Gallagher has investigated. "Two Stories" is about the murder of her uncle in 1972: it compares someone else's lurid account of the killing with her own perceptions…. In "Breasts," she dates the end of her childhood rap...

[Tess Gallagher's] beautifully designed second book, Under Stars … shows her braving the most difficult of entanglements: unlike almost all other poets of her generation I have read, she faces up, in every line of her work, to the full engagement with language…. Her poems evince a syntactic regeneration, a new involvement with the processes and passage of time. Gallagher's work requires enough liveliness in the reader to follow her through facet after facet of grammatical inclina...

[Tess Gallagher's poems in Stepping Outside] are subtle; one thinks, somehow, of underground passages that recurve on themselves, so that the adventurer is expelled at the exact spot he entered the maze, retaining the conviction of hidden treasure; or, of the accomplished stripper, who has vanished from the stage by the time the yokels realize that it is her sequined G-string that is spinning toward them through the smoky air. You will notice that in both these analogies the baffled reader is represe...

[Under Stars] is in two parts, titled separately. Start Again Somewhere, the second part, is a loose collection whose theme is the generosity that time rather extorts from us if we are to remain sane and good-humored in the face of the mortal erosion our dreams, our loves, ourselves are subject to. (Whew!)… These poems are always compassionate, sometimes sad, sometimes deeply funny. The language is luminous, rhythmical, occasionally complex but never too difficult. Best are perhaps "My Mother ...

[Tess Gallagher's poems in Under Stars are] personal lyrics, done with a verbal finesse rare to find these days in the common American free-form convention. I am tempted to call it feminine. And I do, risking the era's awkward consequences, because there is after all a womanly sensibility in literature, thank heaven, and we can recognize it. Moreover, Gallagher's poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception that I, at any rate, associate with women; the capaci...

Tess Gallagher's Under Stars … evokes commonplace images and events, and renders a familiar world in beautifully precise terms. Like Instructions for the Double, Gallagher's excellent first book, Under Stars presents, in rigorously pared-back language, a series of observations, or states of feeling before they pass into conscious observations. Some of the poems are in the poet's voice, others are in the voices of strangers, or a voice suggested by a "careless waltz"...

Tess Gallagher's Instructions to the Double takes its title seriously. It operates on several levels of dialectic: the redemption and cruelty of the family, the notions of continuity and change, of absence and presence, of leaving and returning. The exploration of the family is central to the book: in "Coming Home," Gallagher expresses tenderness toward her mother and simultaneously recognizes the necessity and brutality of her leaving home…. But perhaps the central concern of th...