In The New York Times, Sven Birkerts wrote of Lynne Sharon Schwartz's fiction, "she sets before us fiction's most beautiful effect: we believe these moments to be unique; life has not been quite like this, and will never be quite like this again, ever." In In Solitary, Lynne Schwartz's first book of poems, she shows this gift with greater intensity and goes into areas that prose with its concentration on comparative values does not enter. T.S. Eliot has written that what is better said in prose, should be said in prose and not in poetry. Here Schwartz gives voice to the solitary, hidden, mythological, and fragmentary aspects of her life--to parts of words that is consonants, to her leg, to insomnia, to thought on Kafka, to skywriting. In Solitary is a highly profound and original work of art.