Emily Warn is a poet of kinship and harmony. And she often uses narrative to establish surprising relationships. Warn's poems define a sensibility that is fully in focus, one that expresses a reverence for humanity and nature as two participants in a greater whole. Eschewing unnecessary artifice and the latest literary fads, she writes poems, it seems, only from necessity, from great faith in a possible world.

In selecting The Leaf Path for the 1981 King County Arts Commission Publication Project, Susan Griffin wrote: "Emily Warn’s poetry is feeling, moving, dealing with the powerful and deepest part of being, yet delicately, even precisely crafted. This is a new voice we will all be blessed for hearing."