Like ornamental craftwork, the contemporary sonnets in Quilling Will enfold Shakespeare’s lines into delicate coils of idiosyncratic image and revelation. Pleated into an exotic, sensuous tapestry of the natural world, the poems explore an uncertain future of climate change, mortality, and humanity’s cruel and destructive impulses. Yet, these are poems of memory and hope. “Det är ingen ko på isen,” Jennings writes, “There’s no cow on the ice/so no need to worry.” Jennings’ sonnets are sumptuous “wishes to make the world/sweeter before it snaps apart.”

— Wendy Mannis Scher, author of Fault

“Alice-Catherine Jennings revitalizes the canonical sonnet, carrying the conversation with William Shakespeare into the twenty-first century. The poems in Jennings’ collection are at once contemporary and heavily steeped in the past, effectively blurring the so-called barriers of time and place. In so doing, Jennings asks her readers to consider the intricate relationships between all humanity, reminding us that even minute details can resonate with unexpected discovery.”

—Tara Ballard, author of House of the Night Watch