"Reading How to Disappear, I have the sense of someone tearing the past apart and rebuilding with naked raw hands. Claudia Reder is a story teller and this book is her lyrical gift to us, poems of growing up in the teeming city with the complex women who shaped her--immigrant grandmother and mother whose rich mix of languages turned the struggling young girl into a poet who survives to tell their stories. "The list of ghosts / who, no matter where I wander, / who I marry, / who as mother, wife and sister, / haunt me still." These full to bursting poems recreate large, unavoidable terrors and the seemingly small but necessary moments of joy that make art an act of love. They constantly go farther, go deeper with language that is wildly alive, informed by erudite and whimsical exuberance. How to Disappear is a splendid book, serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning. As I read it, I keep thinking, "This is why I love poetry."

--Mary Kay Rummel, Former poet laureate of Ventura County, Author of many books, including Cypher Garden, The Lifeline Trembles, and What's Left is the Singing

"By turns rueful and compassionate, with a touch of magic realism, Reder gathers her mother's life and pours the prickly love that is the legacy she leaves her daughter, into a series of poems filled with the meaningful objects of their lies lived together and apart, vivid colors, umbrellas and uncles, sisters and jewels, and always, stories."

--Florence Weinberger, Author of numerous poetry collections including Carnal Fragrance (Red Hen Press) and Sacred Graffiti (Tebot Bach Press)

"The house is burning. / Wherever I step, a new ember" ("The Decision") marks a turning point in Claudia Reder's child-life and is a thread that runs through her collection How to Disappear as she delves into family history. "We live like this, / skin sewed onto skin" ("Fable Needing a Moral"): each section links grandmother to mother to daughter in awareness of love, regret, and discovery. While Reder "sing[s] the moon out of me" ("The Night Before Leaving"), her mother is the "keeper of secrets" ("3pm After School My Mother Picks Me Up"). And her grandmother, enduring and memorable Asya, is celebrated to the end: "...you chose abundance.... / You clasped your hands, applauding life" ("Late Night, Lodged on the Corner of the Bed"). How to Disappear is a poignant reminder of both the joys and insecurities of childhood and the important choices we make in deciding which memories to keep and which to let go."

--KB Ballentine resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she teaches creative writing, theatre arts, and literature. Her book The Perfume of Leaving received the Blue Light Press Book Award. She is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her latest book is Almost Everything, Almost Nothing (Middle Creek Publishing & Audio).