Station Lights

“What sets [Pettway's poems] apart more than any other virtue is the subtle but insistent sense of irony they convey—one of the rarest and most valuable aspects of any art, but especially of poetry.”
—Miller Williams, Inaugural poet

“At the last page, I realize Pettway has turned me into the eponymous moth, desperate for that beautiful and dangerous fire that burns in only the best poems but which seems to burn here in every poem.”
—Michael Prihoda, author of Out of Sky and editor of After the Pause

“[W]e are from one poem to the next accompanied by her keen eye for the unseen and the nourishment supplied by her own fortitude.”
—Paul B. Roth, editor and publisher at The Bitter Oleander Press

“Alice Pettway's Barbed Wire and Bedclothes explores the familiar and finds it all akimbo and sharp-elbowed. … These poems are terse, precise, evocative, and sensuous; to anyone grown timid or lazy or comfortable, they send a challenge: ‘cut the barbed wire now and chance the landmines.’”
—Philip Appleman, author of Open Doorways, Let There Be Light and numerous other books