“Schnackenberg has turned her erudition, technical mastery, and objectivity to extraordinary account, and has set wide new sights for poets of her generation. She has cracked open the lyric of personal anecdote and set it in the light of history. And she has drawn, from that breached and extended lyric, a pulse that is distinctively her own.” —Rosanna Warren, The New Republic

“A Gilded Lapse of Time, [Schnackenberg's] darkest and yet most radiant book, is divided into three poetic sequences so enraptured, so lost in annunciations and resurrections, that they might be called visions . . . [These] new poems have a leisurely grandeur; they are written in a melodic free verse, unfolding phrase by phrase into long, barely sustainable sentences. Less controlled by form than her earlier work, they show an unusual concern with the market of mind and religion, the movement of mind and philosophy. In her seriousness and glamour she is reminiscent of the British poet Geoffrey Hill, who is more repressed and less passionate. These dream visions, where one image shimmers over the next like water over water, glass over glass, sound like the voice of history--accusing, condemning, and rarely forgiving. [This] is one of the most difficult and moving books to appear in recent American poetry.” —William Logan, The New York Times Book Review