"Aristotle said that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, and to be one is to be a genius. Voisine is that great thing, and that genius. Nearly every line of every poem is its own poem. She has re-visioned our most looked-at things. She brings us new ways to see, and to be. To travel through the neighborhood of this collection is to be surprised at every corner turned, but to recognize it completely. There is no greater poetic gift, or thrill."

Laura Kasischke, author of The Infinitesimals

"'The next poem I write will be better,' begins the final poem in Connie Voisine's wonderful Calle Florista. This strikes me as quite a hefty promise, since the poems in this volume are already so gratifying and surprising. They carve a marvelous spot for themselves at the crossroads of joy and regret, pathos and humor, faith and doubt, elegance and quirkiness, making the very most, not only of 'the flimsy scraps that more genuinely / compose the day' but also of the very largest concerns: 'Maybe the soul isn’t a fussy eater-- / still, it is ravenous / and expensive.'" 

Jacqueline Osherow, author of Whitethorn

"In her haunting new collection Calle Florista, Voisine dances at the edge of nihilism, an imaginative and moral strategy borrowed from George Herbert, whose style of doubt and recovery she celebrates throughout the book. Her poems flirt with ugliness and with  nothingness, negating the body, the street, the desert flowers, the natural world itself. Yet an astonishing, powerful affirmative lyric drive wells up: ‘the way a wren /of a word then another gives itself to a sentence.’  These remarkable poems operate like everyday miracles, driving the reader from despair to belief, word by word—into the perfect radiance of  profound poetic revelation."

Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Sparrow