Barbara Hoffert listed The Alphabet Conspiracy as a “Rising Star” on the Prepub Alert Blog for The Library Journal.
Here’s what she had to say:
Having worked at the Dictionary of American Regional English, Rita Mae Reese (The Alphabet Conspiracy. Arktoi: Red Hen. 79p. ISBN 9780980040739. $17.95) not surprisingly loves words, though less as lush props than entities packed with history and meaning (“From the Sanskrit duh, the world gets a stream of daughters”; “I am the ghost word of my father/ in my mother’s life”). A “Discovery”/The Nation and Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Reese, a lesbian, also explores issues of social import in her lucid and approachable poems. You can only love a poet who writes, ‘When God closes a door, we break a window.’
For a lot of great poetry recommendations, check out the full article.