"[A] tremendous sense of line..." Publishers Weekly

"Elements, moods, poisons, obstacles; Brenda Iijima's poems make use of all four, particularly elements, in forming the core of Around Sea. There is a strange, welcoming warmth to these poems that has nothing to do with forcing a personscape onto the land (though Iijima is starkly aware of that force's inexorable severity): 'a terrestrial in the face of extra.' I feel calm during and after reading Around Sea — not abducted, but included, as if presence could override fate through seeing, and getting it down onto the page." Anselm Berrigan

"A brilliant visual and musical work, where the techniques of our times are perfected and abandoned one by one. What goes up, comes down, until the only way out is with it." Fanny Howe

"Brenda Iijima's Around Sea is a substantial, beautiful, and manifoldly interesting book of poetry. Her focus shifts smoothly from sonic word-play to informational passages drawn from natural sciences and even metallurgy to ecology and passionate urban sociology, and onwards. Her forms often change radically from one section of a poem to another and her rhythms are constantly changing. Readers are happily kept on their toes." Jackson Mac Low

"Around sea's surround sound's me. It becomes me being sound being sea. Any
me. We. Around Sea's surround sound's we.
She sells Seychelles by the sea shore's roar. Will it last. That is this
Book's chore. Who could ask for more.
Can poetry preserve skies. Yes. A breath at a time." Alan Davies

"Neither outline nor shape: this is the molecular flux of idea...in Brenda Iijima's hard-as-diamonds epic. Around Sea plots a threat nexus over a flowering terrain and beneath the serene deep of 'verdure attributed to rain,' bonitos, and species extinction...dividing into quanta of insight: the rock and steel we work and sleep in, as well as the ground we walk, support no truths that are not aerial...Iijima's precision in uncanny exposition, social science apercu, and mercurial jurisprudence." Jack Kimball