"(Steven Sher manages) to transform the anomalies of daily living into something as rich and dense as a tapestry."
John Ashbery
"(There are) tremors of realization...a strong feeling of location...a gust of feeling as I read."
William Stafford
“Unabashedly emotional, this is poetry of the deepest sentiment, as full of moving truths as it is full of invention…illumined by the transformative power of the poet’s language.”
Barry Wallenstein
“Steven Sher is our guide to love and affection in this fallen world…In this age of hustle and hype, his soft-pitched and steady voice is just what we need.”
Charles Fishman
“Throughout these quiet, loving and humorous poems about a father, the reader comes to know why such a person ensures the survival of the generation…a deeply felt spiritual exploration.”
Glenna Luschei
“In our time I can think of no more sustained and rending justice done to death of a loved friend…At (Sher’s) finest it is as fine as the ‘Absalom/Absalom.’”
Ron Bayes
“Sher is a poet of exceptional verbal gifts and unique sensibility who never forgets that ‘the human spirit will survive.’”
Morton Marcus
“(Sher’s poems) are driven by a considerable spiritual depth…(and are) of that tradition in English poetry reaching from Donne to Hopkins to Vassar Miller.”
Tom Ferté
"I was moved by the accumulating weight of a world—a world densely populated, keenly observed...the street-life of Brooklyn of the '40s and '50s, the culture of East European Jews...."
Marc Kaminsky
“Take a pinch of Chelm, a dab of midrash, hearty sprinklings of Kafka and I. B. Singer, a touch of Rabbi Nachman and you'll have a taste of Steve Sher's stories from Slawotich, a town where magic is as common as black bread.”
Eric Kimmel
”(Sher’s work) feels very much like something Woody Allen or Mel Brooks might write. Great fun.”
Daniel Jaffe
“Wise without being bitter, simple without being naïve—these are tales you’ll read to your children with a little shiver, the way the great family stories are read.”
Joanne Greenberg