"Whether telling her students the story of her life, reliving adolescent sex, or confronting her own fears, silliness and ambition, Mazur never gives in to sentiment. Meditative, musical, direct, her poems frequently double back on themselves emotionally in a manner that is simultaneously tender and ironic.... Mazur's is a world of time passing.... Her vision of the world is ultimately one of connection, one in which revelation (and what we are able to say about it) lies in the ordinary, 'not golden, or blazing, but homely.'"

The Women's Review of Books

"Forbidden City is a book of wondrous form-finding. These poems are often about art itself, but they have none of the insularity we might associate with 'art for art’s sake.' For Mazur, the pursuit of form is not a matter of neglecting emotional, messy content, much less of writing in traditional measures.... Instead, in all their tonal variety, these poems reveal form as a quality that philosophical concepts and good jokes have in common, a logic of simultaneous surprise and inevitability.... Traveling deftly from raw, existential statement to notes on the fridge, Mazur’s poems are acts of embodiment, giving shape to experience, including the most painful and most ecstatic, the most monumental and most ordinary. I can’t think of another living poet who, while honoring both the need to give shape to life and the inevitability of 'undoing,' has so successfully realized this passion for experience in all its tones and forms."

Provincetown Arts

"Mazur's book is in part about all the loves you can't help--and why should you? It's the love of words (and crowded consonants) that lures the speaker down to earth's noisy company from the silence (and long vowels) of solo flight....I love her bargain, which seems to me to represent the bargain that we all must strike between the griefs and desires we feel when we are split by the knowledge we are living and dying. That's what makes our lives guilty--we can't be guided purely by either kind of knowledge.... It's good to be along for the ride with such a driver gripping the wheel for our dear guilty lives."

Agni