W. H. Auden awarded Helen Adam the New York Quarterly's Madeline Sadin Award for "excellence in craft"; Richard Howard described her ballads as "glittering sorceries"; and Robert Duncan referred to her as "the grain of living poetry that saves me at times." Adam's magical ballads, the core of her poetry, are collected here for the first time with her own thoughts on the ballad and commentary by Annie Finch and Kristin Prevallet.




Hail the singularity of Pixie Pool! Hail the doyenne of golden monstrous hair, devouring our hunger for wild ballads both ancient-rooted and shiny new as only she can do!

-Lee Ann Brown




The luminous balladeer Helen Adam was an anomaly who dropped into the most experimental scenes of contemporary poetry. Her unique orality has been engraved on many generations of poets. She now enters our contemporary consciousness through the reprint of these ballads, playing out as they do the timeless battles of the psyche. -Anne Waldman




"Adam is the most exuberantly anachronistic of second wave modernist poets. Her magical, macabre, magnificently chilling ballads open a secret door with rimes both gruesome and sublime." - Charles Bernstein




"Helen Adam . . . was the indispensable link between the most ancient traditions of poetry in our language and the development of current American poetry." -Robert Kelly