"'Dark-haired, doe-eyed, red-lipped,' perched on the edge of disaster, B.D. Love's characters enter us from around the world, from Michoacan and Cambodia, from bars and laundromats and the concrete banks of the Los Angeles River. With stately rhythms, painfully wrought rhymes and in classic forms, Love constructs these poems with desperate urgency in a noble attempt to make sense of loss, of murder, of sickness and grief. In so doing, he raises anonymous suffering to the level of tragedy, and heartbreak to the release of song." - Lewis MacAdams "What gratitude and astonishment I feel reading B. D. Love's poetry. His commitment to and deep understanding of his students (to whom he dedicates this book) have given birth to a stunning collection of poems that, with unusual eloquence, authenticity, and bite, speak for women of Los Angeles - recent immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua; abused wives; a "fat lady"; women who live amidst gang violence - whose voices are often not heard and rarely acknowledged. Love's women's monologues and meditations are both lyrical and disturbing in their unceasing honesty, as tough and tender as the lives he's celebrating." - Amy Uyematsu Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain "B.D. Love combines a powerful gift of language with the insight of the born storyteller. To read one of the poems in Water at the Women's Edge is to find yourself suddenly dropped into some stranger's life, looking at the world through eyes not your own but somehow seeing as though those were your own eyes. The poem "Second Brother," in particular, is one of American literature's best evocations of the Southeast Asian refugee tragedy. In my writings, I've only tried to explain the lives of people from this hard part of the world. B.D. Love breathes with them." - Carl L. Bankston III Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States "Water at the Women's Edge gives an observer's glimpse of immigrant Los Angeles that is as authentic as a first-person account. Author B. D. Love writes honest and vulnerable, in a day & time where these traits are usually exploited by craft. Here integrity - in form and vision - triumphs over manner. These poems safely deliver the rhythm of lives lived to readers who should never have to be so unguarded. Enjoy." - Mat Gleason Coagula Art Journal