A Toast in the House of Friends
Reviews

BookForum:
“[Oliver's] innovative blend of poetry and prose is an attempt to discover a new, more genuine language, one that can dampen sorrow while bearing witness to unfathomable loss.”

Library Journal:
“When Oliver presents her experiences in metaphor-rich language, the reader feels what she feels: incredible loss, infinite pain.”

Twin Cities Daily Planet:
“A Toast in the House of Friends is written in a free-wheeling hand that evinces distinct originality. Oliver is a rhythmic writer, and an exceptional one at that. She strikes the cadence of each piece so effectively, you can feel the poem on the page.”

Feminist Review:
“A haunting tribute . . . Oliver creatively uses words and structure to create her own expression . . . deeply touching.”

Charles Bernstein
“The ceremony of sorrow is performed with a measured, defiant acknowledgment that makes words charms, talismans of the fallen world. This poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear to return as radiant moments of memory's forgiving home.”

Alice Notley:
“A Toast in the House of Friends brings us back to life via the world of death and dream, which is the world, as well, open wide, of love and our ultimate instability. What we have accepted dissolves into stories in pieces still connecting us. The body, the ‘site where we are all already belated,' is the body through which we are all related—I am different, mourning you, but there is only us, this terrifying sweet beauty . . . Akilah Oliver's book is an extraordinary gift for everyone, language pushing beyond itself into the aura of holy graffiti in the big night, unstable shapes that won't break.”