“. . . you will be engaged—as Moldaw in her highly intelligent way takes a small Odyssey . . . She sees and says impressions and signifiers in beautiful decibels that we would otherwise not imagine.” —Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“What, Moldaw seems to be asking, by paying attention, do we miss? How is our desire to possess the world through language related to (and how does it affect) our responsibility to the world?”
—Lisa Russ Spaar on “A Leaf’s Gravity,” The Chronicle of Higher Education

 “The last section of the book includes the eponymous poem “Beauty, Refracted” . . .  a canto of motherhood and fantastic worlds, in which pain and imagination smooth out the inevitable pitfalls of growing and self-discovery . . . Such moments of introspection, on occasion . . . collide with beams of light and reveal the oblique and expanding poetic discourse that makes Carol Moldaw’s Beauty Refracted a fascinating book of poems.”
—Irina Moga, Split Rock Review’s Shoreline

“. . . readers will find this book’s gifts inexhaustible . . . The poetry of Carol Moldaw presents the world, even the most familiar world, as sudden discovery, as mystery. To read So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems is to travel toward the unanticipated . . .”
—Suzanne Cleary, American Letters & Commentary

“You never know at the beginning of a Moldaw poem, just where it will take you, and you have the sense, as a reader, that she doesn’t know either. She shapes her subjects, yes, but they also shape her.”
—Jim Moore, Rain Taxi

“What I admire about Moldaw’s work are the complexities of syntax, the felicitous phrases and careful word choices . . . Some poets find conventional syntax limiting, but Moldaw uses it here as a tool of discovery.”
—Jon Davis, The Santa Fe Reporter

“. . . memorably sharp, poignant, searing in its revelations of the agony of youthful sexuality and misfiring relationships.”
—Forrest Gander, Poetry Foundation Blog

“. . . an erotic pilgrimage along the precipice between the buoyancy of creative spirit and the body’s weighty rites of passage . . . The language of the book is transformative . . . constructed in the golden proportions of a lyrical master builder.”
—Nicole DePolo, Provincetown Arts

“In her terse and lyrical first novel The Widening, Carol Moldaw maintains a poetic habit of nuance in territory where opportunities to employ cliché and politics abound: that of a young woman’s sexual awakening.”
—Leah Falk, Pleiades

“Carol Moldaw has added to her body of work a lyrical novel that is both artfully crafted and sensually compelling.”
—Carol Lavelle, The Bloomsbury Review

“The way such poems turn a dime is one of the pleasures of the work: Moldaw’s wandering thoughts are held together by her tight handle on language . . .Moldaw’s all-seeing eye, whether trained on ancient Greece, an AP photo, or her own family, has the sureness of an oracle itself, and what it divines is bold, evocative, intelligent, and deftly told. The Lightning Field is a divining rod, humanity sharpened into a flash of light.”
—Arielle Greenberg, Rain Taxi

On the surface of [Moldaw’s] work are rich sounds and variations of rhythm and line. A few steps deeper in lie wells of feeling and complexities of thought.”
—Frieda Gardner, The Women’s Review of Books

“The eponymous sixteen-poem centerpiece of Carol Moldaw’s The Lightning Field is remarkable in its ability to capture what it is to be a being in space . . . Simply put, the poems become a world instead of merely being about the world.”
—Eric Elshtain, Chicago Review

“With 23 sections in all, Through the Window moves from longing to luxurious sensuality to quarrel to abandon and back again—hitting many of the notes of the classic love poem. These poems have an airy, almost ephemeral feeling—an off-the-cuff emotional declaration. They are defined by a delicacy of feeling, and of language.”
—Miriam Sagan, The Santa Fe New Mexican

“Several different forms of maturity—emotional, artistic, religious—come together in Moldaw’s second book of poems, which repeatedly achieves lyric junctures of shivering beauty . . . obliquely, and intensely intelligent poems.”
—Briefly Noted, The New Yorker

 “With wit, a sensitive ear, and uncommon formal control, Carol Moldaw braids a line on which one could shinny straight back to Elizabeth Bishop. . . more evidence that Moldaw has a good deal invested in the pursuit of grace through discipline. Chalkmarks on Stone is rock solid.”
—Eric McHenry, Bostonia

 “Carol Moldaw has written  . . . poems of intelligent consideration and a deft heart-born music, filled with the gleam of particularity and a lushness of language and substance.”
—Jane Hirshfield