Without a Claim (2013)

"Grace Schulman belongs to that small number of lyric poets whose every book expands and deepens the range of the previous one. Seldom has the world been seen so clearly, a vision inseparable from an ethical understanding of experience. She teaches us to answer loss with a greater thing than acceptance: like the Psalmist, like Kaddish, like Rilke, she shows us how to love and praise the world.” -Alfred Corn

“No matter your mood upon entering this world you’ll soon be grateful, and enchanted. The glory in these radiant sacred songs meld an art of high music with a nuanced love of the world unlike any we’ve heard before.” -Philip Schultz

“WithoutaClaim, Grace Schulman's exhilarating book of poems, flies free of any restraint or limitation on the imagination. She describes, in poem after poem, what it means to be in the world without a claim, from the Montauk chief who freely traded land for mirrors, with no sense of 'property' -- to Miles Davis, leaning like a 'night heron' in the Village -- to the author's own balancing act, on 'a circus wire,' above mortal fear and infirmity. These poems, like her ancestors, wander within surmise: 'Ask the sea / at sunrise how a million sparks / can fly over dead bones.’" -Carol Muske Dukes