"Hayes's restless and searching debut addresses the pain and disorientation of assimilation alongside the comforts of family....emotionally resonant and insightful....This debut provides an honest and moving tribute to the immigrant experience." -Publishers Weekly

"Doubleness is vital to the experience of reading One Strange Country-one feels pulled with the speaker as she is pulled between languages, countries, and memories. Hayes' poetry shows us that yes, a person can exist in multiple places at once-this is how history acts on the body. Human lives are interstitial, why should our poems be any less so?" - Hannah VanderHart, EcoTheo Review

"Like someone displaced as a child and, after everything, living a perfectly ordinary, loving life, One Strange Country craves an 'ordinary-- / type of happiness.' Like family, like the past, 'An exile's life is planned out one day at a time.' And we do, too, in this marvelous debut collection of poems." -Ralph Angel, author of the poetry collection, Your Moon

"There is a raw thread of loss-of homeland, of family, of innocence-weaving itself through Stella Hayes' exquisite and deeply compelling debut collection, One Strange Country. With its restless reckonings and mature power, One Strange Country is a book to hold close and treasure."- David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems

"At turns gleeful and elegiac, grateful and defiant, One Strange Country considers the state of exile. In "Monolith," Hayes writes, "I am in a memory, in the generation I lived among you. / I stand against a world that has no use for paper." The poet never shies away from her lonely mission, guiding readers through landscapes both seen and unseen."- Erica Wright, author of All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned