The Marble Bed

"Read this collection if you have grieved. Read it if you want to be restored to the world around you. Read it, then look up, breathe in, raise your hands, and let Grace Schulman assure you: ‘I'll be there, / gazing impiously--unless / that is what sacred is, the work, the looking up, / the wonder.’"-Julie Sheehan, The East Hampton Star, November 11, 2020.

"Grace Schulman is a national treasure. This sumptuous array of splendid, hard-won poems feels in its essence like one poem, one surging grace note that sings out not only across years and oceans, but also across the great divide that separates the living from the dead and the knowable from the unknowable."-Rowan Ricardo Phillips

“Grace Schulman’s The Marble Bed confronts life and death. Here’s a lyrical journey paced by sonnets that create a totalizing effect, with the surprise of jazz between tropes. The poet knows when, where, and what to leave out of lyrical portraits so the reader also helps to create meaning. We see and feel into the truth.”-Yusef Komunyakaa

"Grace Schulman's precise, evocative descriptions feel simultaneously valedictory and vividly present: an affirmation of the world even in the midst of the pain that it brings." –Peter Mackuk, The Hudson Review

"Schulman's work has a dignified, sculptural grace that counterpoints the inner noise and agitation many of us bear. To read her is to come off a busy city street into a cathedral nave, to be still, or to walk quietly along the edge of the evening sea." -Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters.

"In this profound, elegiac new volume, Grace Schulman seeks to immortalize as if in marble the sustaining power of love. Schulman is our poet of, yes, grace, of elegance, and sorrow, of poems born out of the chiseled stone of reflection as they yearn and achieve transcendence."-Jill Bialoski.

"A gorgeous non-compliance with the world's tendency to proceed toward its own demise."-Ron Slate, On the Seawall

"The Marble Bed is magnificent. I am swept away by its trajectory and the luminescence of each poem. What a gift to the world this collection is." -Elise Paschen

"The Marble Bed is beautiful in conception and execution, a marvel of vision and passion. From early Montauk to the pandemic, Italian angels of ‘sex and death’ to visions of ascension on Fifth Avenue, Grace Schulman seeks and finds tranquility in blizzards, the price of silk, love in all its endless grief and convolutions."-Philip Schultz

"Grace Schulman's poems never forget we are all specks in the universe and sparkle only for a time. Her style is unruffled and her tone is controlled, but love and grief haunt the clarity of her mind."-Henri Cole

"In the voice of a caregiver or widow, traveler or gardener, she brings forth ghosts out of the wind-driven detritus of Manhattan, and eloquently summons tomb sculptures from Italy, easily traveling zones, cities, worlds: time."-Sophie Cabot Black