“‘[A] fierce throat and then nothing.’ In a True Crime is anyone really innocent? Donna de la Perrière doesn’t think so. Her witness can never be absolved from culpability, can never escape her heritage, be it the ancestral ache of family or the social assault of dinner parties and public transportation. De la Perrière’s landscape of corpses and misfits is trashy and sublime, outrageous and beautiful. And frighteningly funny. Is that a ghost or rodent that scratches behind the walls of the poem? Does it matter? The text/world fractures and light rushes in. This is a gorgeous and important book.” -Dodie Bellamy
“It is thrilling to read True Crime. Haunted by history, it is a finely imagined ghost dance. But it’s not simply the macabre that surfaces as the theme of these fine poems: it’s the fragile line between life and death and how, through language, we negotiate the not-quite-here and not-quite-there, in this region of ‘umber and desire.’ There is danger too: mishap and accident, even murder. The reader is invited to witness these silent ceremonies, as they are enacted with beauty and precision. Donna de la Perrière is a master of this realm.” -Maxine Chernoff
“True Crime is a fitting title for this sympathetic and sometimes harrowing family portrait of the American South: the uncle who absconded with the insurance money, the boyfriend who cares more about his muscle car than his dead girlfriend. The author and sometime subject of the poems spins from the loom of words ‘not the wreck but a conjectural/reconstruction of the wreck.’ In such a fragile, wobbling world, language acts as the only shield. This is a wonderful and brave book, offering the true fictions of our actual darkness.” -Paul Hoover
“Faulkner’s barbed wire around the indecipherable South, ‘You would have to be born there,’ is cut down by Donna de la Perrière’s poetry. One urgent line at a time is drawn like a blood sample: here is a poet of enormous and visionary talent.” -Jane Miller
