Barbara Tramonte’s poems are as conversational as Frank O’Hara and as pithy as Edna St. Vincent Millay. Both direct and metaphoric, the poems hold you at arm’s length then shatter with a quick peck on the cheek or a held gaze. In the title poem “Oddities,” for example, the line “A tiger runs for the throat” seems a celebration of danger for it is good and smart, savage and carnal. Here are poems that explore New York and womanhood; the many places we are bound to and murderous of (in thoughts only, I’m sure). Like a tiger, the poems consume their reader, they are also “bulging orbs of consolation”. They lead you down many paths “slick with sea-moss” where “sex is the new handshake.”Yvonne Blomer is the City of Victoria, BC, Canada’s Poet Laureate. Her most recent book of poems is As if a Raven, Palimpsest PressThis collection of poems can be described in numerous ways but most of all, I found myself being transported by achingly beautiful words into dreamy worlds. There is a heartbreaking sorrow in some of these gems but there is also poignancy, humor, courage, grit and a deep love of places and spaces (NYC, Hawaii, Mexico...), people, and the world at large. Savor and treasure each jewel of a word and sentence that take your breath away with their piercing truth and uncanny, indigenous wisdom. This is a brilliant accomplishment and one meant to be read and reread....a true and steady companion for all seasons.Dianne Ramdeholl is the author of Adult Literacy In A New Era: Reflections from the Open BookThe oddity of Barbara Tramonte’s work is in the rarity in which we find such immaculate compression. She serves us the soul of her subjects, whether it be an exotic place, a voice for the downtrodden, intricacy of a relationship or the haunt of loss. Her expert use of poetic devices conveys wisdom, humor, honesty, love, fear and frailty--conditions that define what it means to be human. Here indeed is a literary cabinet of curiosities where the poems become conversation pieces, albeit internal ones, that comment on our erratic and extraordinary current times.Ellaraine Lockie, award-winning poet, nonfiction author and educator