WHO SAID just took 6th in Coldfront's top 40 poetry book of 2013 countdown!

“Walls rise and fall,” Hecht reminds us. But her book ought to be read by anyone who has experienced feelings of depression or meaninglessness, as it helps beg the question:  ... how am I going to feel later when it comes down to it even more, and am I prepared to deal with that? Hecht’s answer is an exhilarating yes, a charge uphill that contextualizes our small existences while painting them part of something that, as it is figured out in increments, can yield more elaborate and illuminating mysteries.

- John Deming on Coldfront's Top 40 of 2013

Praise for Jennifer's poetry

"Hecht's rhymes are irregular, gymnastic, pointed, and fun; she's found what so many would-be populists seek, an idiom entirely conversational yet able to sustain unexpected ideas."—The Believer

Who Said is a meditation on life's profound questions told through playful engagement with iconic poems and lyrics. Jennifer Michael Hecht's book is a magic echo chamber wherein great poems come back to us, altered to fit the concerns of our moment. This wildly interpretive treatment of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and the rock band Nirvana is original, occasionally hilarious, and always moving.

Garrison Keillor reads Hecht's "The No-Hemlock Rock (Don't Kill Yourself)

Garrison Keillor reads Hecht's "On Reading the Letters of the Dead"

Jennifer Michael Hecht  teaches poetry in the MFA program at The New School and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From "Not Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening":

"Promises to keep," was a lie, he had nothing. Through

the woods. Over the river and into the pain. It is an addict's

talk of quitting as she's smacking at a vein. He was always

going into the woods. It was he who wrote, "The only way

around is through." You'd think a shrink, but no, a poet.

He saw the woods and knew. The forest is the one that holds

promises. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, they fill

with a quiet snow. Miles are traveled as we sleep. He steers

his horse off the road. Among the trees now, the blizzard

is a dusting. Holes in the canopy make columns of snowstorm,

lit from above. His little horse thinks it is queer. They go

deeper, sky gets darker. It's the darkest night of the year . . .