“It must be acknowledged that Blandine Longre is a French national writing in English. Perhaps this is why she can appear both concrete and mist together. Perhaps this is why her poetry comes up out of us, rather than dictates a world back to us. There is something both masterful and fresh in the way she approaches the dictates of the language, as if combining the two cultural traditions (one in her blood and one in her pen) can give us access to that special conversation, alluded to in the opening paragraphs of this review, that has been absent for so long. Longre acknowledges her influences in the first few pages of Clarities – Plath is there, Sexton is there, and Donne is there, smiling at her ladder climb, her deeper breath and her stronger swim.”