Soluble Fish is a no-holds-barred romp of language and imagination, a cornucopian celebration of great swathes of the known world, from dung beetles to the ‘black stretch-leotard’ of cosmic space. Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s powerful music does not avoid the chaos and cacophonies of our lives but embraces and transforms them, devours them for nourishment and offers us a splendid richness that challenges, informs, and delights to the point of astonishment.”—Philip Dacey, author of The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins
“Gratitude is what these poems quicken in us, for the witness of this life's abundant gifts: sea monkeys, lily pond, hibiscus—certainly—and the luxuriant ways of fathers, daughters, rivers, song. Gillett transforms the common table, the common talk, into something nearer the holy, holy, holy.”—Thomas Lynch, author of Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans
“Mary Jo Firth Gillett is an audacious writer who swerves between outrageous wit and linguistic abandon. Her insatiable imagination absorbs Pavlov, insect love, potatoes, Newtonian physics and a paper-thin-hibiscus, and this symphony of odd relations existing within and between her poems serves to enlarge our vision, our capacity for sympathy, while producing a rather pleasant form of vertigo. Gillett's juxtapositions delight the senses and intellect simultaneously, making a beeline for the heart of the matter through their vivid attentiveness to the materiality of everyday and not-so-everyday experience.”—Phillis Levin, author of Mercury