Reviews of Emptied of All Ships

EOAGH
by Julian T. Brolaski in issue #4:

"These stanza-pearls are dressed in tight corsets emulating a Roman, masculine brevity. Her use of craft ("last to touch / your craft") tells us shucks we are outside the law..."

Xantippe
by Denise Nico Leto in Xantippe 4/5, Double issue 2006-2007:

To read Emptied of All Ships is to enter an unfixed universe of ideas with taut internal logic, multiple shifts in perspective, syntactic gaps, and a strapping, nearly epic synechdoche. It is a world where sensual juxtapositions abound and elude keeping the reader off balance. The form is at once conrete and motion-filled...

...Sections of the book are themselves indeterminate (as the table of contents goes), but in the actual text there is a new work of visual art between each. Many of the images contain a spidery script, indecipherable symbols, or a hint of calligraphy that directs the reader's attention to the possibility that the letters that make up the words in the text are themselves interpretive hinges that can release manifold signification. These drawings throughout the book act as cartography to mark our way through the unsettled whole, while Brenda Iijima's ghostly and panoramic cover art brings us right into the vortex of water's creative and destructive force.

Jacket Magazine
by Laura Sims in Jacket 28, October 2005:

"Her lines may be tightly controlled, stripped down to the minimum, but they allow for largesse of interpretation as bountiful, fluid, and full of inherent contradictions as the sea itself..."