The Thin Wall--between care and resentment, protectiveness and rage, betrayal and abandonment--marks the furious, vital poems in Martha Rhodes' fifth collection. These poems enact a fierce reckoning with families rent from within or without, trailing attempts at refuge like ripped streamers from a cut-rate lot: no one escapes the creosote of The Thin Wall's collapse. Martha Rhodes has long been one of our finest poets, and now she has written her best and most moving book.-- "Susan Wheeler"
In books that are as demanding as they are beautiful, Martha Rhodes has been mapping the psychic terrain of family life and romantic life in contemporary America. The way we are betrayed by others, the way we betray ourselves, the way love is both harbor and harm, the way memory is both a form of elation and of wounding--Rhodes looks at our instances of extremity and somehow turns them into bittersweet lyric utterance. Spare and unsparing, The Thin Wall is Rhodes doing her most powerful work so far.-- "Rick Barot"
The poems of The Thin Wall are short, mostly only ten to fourteen lines, chipped like shards of overheard conversation, or other times internal dialogue. Once in a while, the poem resembles a witches' spell or lamentation. Either way, this is a poetry of survival: dark, haunted, and strangely-powerfully-luminous.-- "Kenyon Review"