Jacqueline Michaud's poems are alive with the playful yet serious insightful song, / after-shock of pattern she seeks. Her touch is unmistakable--an ear attuned to the actual rhythms and language of her characters, from satirizing the marketers of false promise to dramatizing the resentments and pathos of the long-ago humiliated and unfulfilled dreamers. Her lines give us the pleasures of their accuracies of perception and of speech, and will thrive on being re-read. -- Daniel Hoffman