“‘It gives the mint: the mint we live’ Auerbach writes, as aphids. Her poems, in a manner that I’ve never known before, inhabit the creation of language as a most loving and needed way to learn and teach. To learn and teach what? How to respect and listen completely. Listen to what? To the conversation we are in—a conversation that we are and need to be. What Need Have We for Such as We — each elemental word, building and turning an infinite relation with the real confidence and humility that comes from the heart, shows us the freedom that exists within meeting this need for we. Her language describes as it is revealed, it being the infinite relation of all things— the mint we are. If Alfred Starr Hamilton, Eihei Dogen, Gertrude Stein and Mechtild of Magdeburg joined in a chorus, the music might sound like this incomparable poet.
There is a startling presence in these poems that gives so directly, almost without your noticing it, its ontology, its theology: “I forget how it works, the self, /The self that works into the belief that it is itself itself.” Auerbach understands that meeting experience with complete and earnest attention is prayer and that this prayer is a conversation so near there is nothing that is not taking place and part in it. To me it takes an extraordinary regard for life for a poet to show how exactly poetry is not afflicted by the self but includes the self and its afflictions as necessary conditions of a wisdom that is utterly generous and free. To be able to listen and give with such singular focus and faith, to what is being taught to us in every moment’s word about heart-natured reality— is an almost inconceivable gift. We are lucky to live where Amanda Auerbach’s poems live.” –Farnoosh Fathi
“Amanda Auerbach is a keener psalmist than any writing now. These poems do not simply transpire; they emerge, both leading and being led towards a more perfect light. We are reproved and then restored. What Need Have We for Such as We resounds with crucial, beautiful virtue.” –Donald Revell
“What Need Have We for Such as We does not proclaim to know, to be able to name the need we have. Instead it notices these needs, the moments when humans give each other gifts, share food, parent, love each other, notice each other’s needs. It is a book of quiet poems, ones that at first glance look like lyric. But Amanda Auerbach is a strong enough writer to avoid lyric’s possible determinism and epiphanies and still write a poem that feels as if it is a hit to the gut, a reminder of what is possible in this life we are living in this world” –Juliana Spahr
