Reading this skillful suite of poems is like sitting down in a pleasant metropolitan home, thumbing through the catalogues, and gradually realizing that nothing is what it seems. User’s Guide presents quietly personal poems of memory, relationships, and the passage of time, contemplated though the lens of probability theory, catalogues, how-to manuals, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles Handbook. A moving chapbook of poems.
—Richard Garcia, author of The Flying Garcias, Rancho Notorious, and The Persistence of Objects.
In User's Guide, Judith Pacht weaves poems on the loom of the “instructions” we're given—user's guides for gadgets like “the Handheld Germ-Eliminating Light” and “Circulation-Enhancing Travel Socks,” among other things—and in so doing offers a wry, sly, wickedly funny and deadly serious commentary on our culture of technology and consumption.
—Cecilia Woloch, author of Narcissus (winner of Tupelo Press's Snowbound Competition), Late, Tsigan, and Sacrifice.
