Novelist Geoff Bakers said "Clarinda Harriss writes poems with precision and humor about Baltimore, sex, mortality, and toads; these are poems to read first thing in the morning, and late at night; they have the clarity of early light and the seductiveness of dreams." Well-crafted poems for grown-ups, by a grown-up, Mortmain is Harriss' sixth collection and focuses on growing up and growing older, without giving up sensuality and sexuality????????????indeed, perhaps, increasing these. Poet Moira Egan says, "There has never been a more voluptuous, ripened-berry, fox-stole-scary mingling of death-in-life and life-in-death. Ever."