-Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut State Poet Laureate, author of These Women You Gave Me
Leslie Neustadt is a passionate poet. I am awed and instructed by "The Night She Came to Dinner." The "She" is Eleanor Roosevelt, the family house is humble, the tone quiet and moving: "She planted seeds of how a woman / makes her life a devotion." The poems take us through a life, the practice of devotion-for family, for justice in the world; it is a communal reach. We feel her excitement in a letter to another poet: " ... you've loosened my tongue. I want to sling metaphors . . ." Later poems call for humane action all over the world. Neustadt expresses: "Have endless wars seeped / into my granddaughters' lives?" May her words grow forth: "Seek justice. We must ... "
-Myra Shapiro, When the World Walks Toward You
Ms. Neustadt's luminous, tender poems are attuned to her personal life, as well as the complex conversations of our time. Her poems are open, dazzling, and deep. Her searching spirit responds to the paradoxical world around her. She is one of those poetic souls who make it almost impossible to remember our world before her poetry came to examine it.
-June Gould, author of Beyond the Margins: Rethinking the Art & Craft of Writing
Leslie B. Neustadt's The Sustenance of Stars brings forward devotions of imagination. There's a hush at the center of these poems, though the worlds they describe are hard. These poems are prayers and whispers and make a rich music.
-Stephen Kuusisto, author of Old Horse, What Is to Be Done?