Having been the Captain of a pleasure boat the last 16 years, I found the information contained in Guest Afloat a big help not only to me and my crew, but also to our guests. All too often, my wife and I have invited guests aboard only to realize that our friends have little or no knowledge of what to expect during the voyage. By reading Guest Afoat our friends are introduced to the essentials of cruising so that their apprehension of getting involved in the day to day routine is avoided. The book contains information for both the guest and crew, and I have found many points that I have forgotten over the years. The book is well written and well illustrated and I found the material informative and entertaining. This book should a be "must" for every boats required equipment list.

I bought "Girl Stuff" for my twelve year old niece and she loved it! The book is full of helpful information that all girls want and need to know. It is written with pre-teens in mind but doesn't speak down to them. The smart, whimsical illustrations really create a lighthearted tone to the most awkward teen subjects.

This book came to my attention because my daughter, Barbara,did the illustrations. I have both a 16 year old and a 7 year old Granddaughter , we asked the older one to read the book and comment and she liked it VERY much. Thought it was very informative without talking down to the young person. The 7 year old will get a chance to read it soon.Of course we've passed the book around the family and Barbara's siblings and their spouses agreed that the illustrations were terrific and they liked the text very much. While I was reading it I took it to all my appointments and many people asked me about the book and took down the name so they could order it for their daughter, niece, granddaughter. They were all impressed with the writing as well as the pictures!

This book has helped me all the time! It reasures me over and over again and I don't know where I would be without it. I feel comportable reading it and it really relaxes me.

I can't say I understood this writer's work, but it was very pretty, no not exactly that, it was inventive and sharp, but I didn't really know what was going on. I read it three times, and still didn't know. It's like the moment when an ant falls asleep. You can't quite catch it doing it, and this poetry is something like that. I wish I could talk to the author about what she was up to. This is even harder than Marianne Moore. She is kind of the Marianne Moore of the postmodern set, I'm to understand. Maybe it will take a long time to get her. She feels worth it. Let's keep trying.

Barbara Guest is a very interesting experimental poet. This book is so short -- & thsre are usually so few words on every page -- that it makes for a very good half hour or so of reading. But there's more. If the reader gives enough attention & time to the poems, they become more & more lucid. In their own way, their way of fantastic leaps & enigmatic surprises.

There is a certain dimension of ironic cleverness that we have a right to expect from soi-disant language writers, but lacking here is that joie de vivre that enlivens language. I'm afraid that a gust of Guest, blowing hard, won't do much more than huff and puff.

Guest is an important poet, but this book of prose sketches or "movie stories" can be appreciated by those who might not find their way into her more ethereal verse. What really comes through is a tremendously subtle sensibility both to language and to the visual arts, expressed with a sharp, intelligent sense of humor.

Very disappointing. This poetry is all defense, no rapture. Guest has managed to go from unsung to overrated without a proper period of acknowledged mediocrity.

This is a beautifully produced book that provides the best entry into the strange and elusive poetry of Barbara Guest, one of the original "New York" poets who has only in the past 10 years come to be more widely recognized. Readers attuned to innovative poetry appreciate Guest for her charmed, ethereal elegance and her elliptical narratives. Check out "A Handbook of Surfing" and "The Emphasis Falls on Reality."

This poetry makes no sense. There is a certain pleasure in the deliberate avoidance of meaning and sense, especially if one can ascertain some depth behind the surface. But here the experience of evasion is valued for its own sake, and anyone enamored of the concrete actualities of, say, August Kleinzahler, whose critique of Language I recommend, will find in these poems less than meets the eye.