A passionate eulogy for life on this earth, Via represents an Errand into the wilderness of our contemporary era. DeVoogd’s poetry and prose is in correspondence with the twelfth-century poet Marie de France whose chivalric Lais offer a cartography through our collective consciousness in these apocalyptic times via the “undertow and marvel” of language and history. “Words extend around worlds” and we go on.
—Susan Howe

There’s a remarkable agility in Claire DeVoogd’s poetry, a tension from line to line and image to image that is wickedly smart and wickedly spooky. Somewhere between “a cathedral of every pink” and “a moss so green it bleeds real blood” she conjures old souls into new bodies and fleshes out the hope that lurks in apocalyptic dreams.
—Lisa Jarnot

Near the end of Via, Claire DeVoogd writes of her interest in the ways worlds extend around words. When I read that I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. Actually, I’d already been struck by lightning a million times while reading Via, and DeVoogd’s worlds/words extension just crystallized that experience. Via is the closest experience I’ve ever had to time-traveling via poems, with Claire’s addresses to Marie de France leading us to Paradiso as Apocalypse and/or vice versa. The thing is, this book is insanely pleasurable. A scroll of refusals in hyper-inclusive stacks of couplets? Check. The sense of maybe seeing every painting everywhere all at once? Check. Total formal command in informal service of exhausted expansion? Yeah. I love this book so much.
—Anselm Berrigan

In DeVoogd’s poetry, there’s a voluptuousness of beginning, of a timeless spring, as often characterized medieval troubadour verse. … DeVoogd’s debut suggests that the world of myth is closer than ever to the reality we are facing.
—Paul Vangelisti, LARB

… made up of startlingly sequenced, vivid images that present the facts of the world as they might appear through an imaginative kaleidoscope. DeVoogd accomplishes this through close attention to language, and particularly to the way that words play off of each other through rhyme, half-rhyme, alliteration, and conceptual likeness and contradiction.
—Daniel Barbiero, Artedolia

As much as she would reinhabit, resurrect, and rehabilitate past legends, DeVoogd seeks also accurately to witness and to communicate: not only terrors, but also pragmatic ways to survive, living and dreaming. … DeVoogd’s poetic strength-training, brilliantly on display in Via, testifies to imagination’s viability, even at this fearsome time (especially, perhaps, at this fearsome time). With humor and perspicacity, DeVoogd leads the way, pointing out passages terrifying and absurd, thorny or elegant. She shares chilling horrors and terrifying bad dreams, but also entertains her readers with joys that closely drawn observation and fresh perspective can bring. Claire DeVoogd’s Via delivers bitter warnings — but also holds out real courage — for the road ahead.
—Chris Hosea, Jacket 2

If one’s dreams are as vivid, colorful, and complex as DeVoogd’s poems, then every waking must be an apocalypse. And what better way to understand the disillusionment of our times.
—Krysia Wazny McClain, Colorado Review