"Just as the Bertolt Brecht the book invokes, Monika Zobel’s An Instrument for Leaving sings to us of the dark and abundant pain of living, the very sadness of being, with the wonder of the colorful objects of life, and everything else that makes electric joy and electric pain the twin pleasures of living...Calling with it its influences of Brecht, of course, and also, Dickinson, Breton, and Stein, Zobel’s book carries with it in its power the magic of the lyric, the twisting lines of truly haunted poetry. Zobel’s poetic hauntings here are like the uncanny feeling of a strange bird in the hand, inescapably present, humming to the dark, smuggling us off with her in an odd and beautiful motionless flight."

-Dorothea Lasky

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