“Stanford is the poet laureate of distance. These astute and acutely crafted poems range across time and across space and expertly excavate the gap between body and mind. They are both catalyzed and haunted by transience, domesticity, sex, and all things scholastic. They draw in Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard of Bingen, and more. They expertly articulate the condition of expectation while expecting absolutely nothing, and while defying the reader's expectations at every turn.”

Natalie Shapero, author of Hard Child