To have at least four Pulitzer Prize winners calling your work original and powerful, is no small thing. And it is no small thing to have your poems praised by such very different poets as Maxine Kumin, Donald Justice, Charles Wright, and Robert Bly. Read Olivia Simpson’s book and see why Donald Justice, the master of prosody in America, declared, “Poems this honest and this direct are hard to come by and must be praised.” In addition, you will find yourself in the center of a real pioneer family whose long walk across The Santa Fe Trail took them in the 1800's to a place named Academy, after their famed one room schoolhouse, The Academy, situated in the foothills of the Sierras east of Fresno, where classical poetry was the foundation for all student education at every age. You will find, as I did, that no one has so lovingly and unsparingly explored the whole range of the family romance: parents, grandparents, great grandparents, her many brothers and her children, all with a sharp and sympathetic eye, but without the least resentment or sentimentality. - Robert Mezey