“Reading When The World Breaks Open at first pleases; here’s a poet who actually took her time and gave the word integrity the serious treatment it deserves—after all, the book is infinitely universal, as it is about human relationship, love, betrayal, trust, defiance, empowerment, sorrow . . . one could go on; one respects not only her precise craft but also her thoroughness. . . . Read it, pass it on, share it with your friends, savor it, smell it, throw it, embrace it, pick it up and read a little and lay it down within reach to pick up another time—it’s one of those books, there when we need it to shed a little light on life’s ups and downs.”

—Jimmy Santiago Baca

“Seema Reza delivers. When the World Breaks Open is a searing song of motherhood, love and redemption through art. Her sons, the death of her marriage, the birth of her courageous artist self is a testimony in which she finds the skin, questions faith, reverberates a familial tongue and rises, yes—rises in a stumbling glory.”

—Mahogany L. Browne

“You would be hard pressed to find a debut book with as much guts, honesty, and wisdom as Seema Reza’s When the World Breaks Open. Written in sparse, atomic epiphanies, she focuses the lens inward, and the result is a raw, emotional ethnography of the human heart. . . . As with Jong, Cisneros, Rich, I predict that Reza is a name we will hear and follow for decades to come.”

—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of Mañana Means Heaven