Learning How to Speak

?Gaite Jansen?s first chapbook is a rite of passage from innocence to awakening, girlhood to young womanhood, voiceless to voiced, and one vocabulary to another. Here are the mature wounds and revelations of first love exposed on the skin of Jansen?s world, in the simple, timidly- lurid language of her unfoldment into a brand new vocabulary. I cannot help but marvel at the difference between a mouth full of Dutch syllables, and a tongue-load of English lyric verse.?

Peggy Dobreer
(Author of In the Lake of Your Bones, Drop and Dazzle, Forbidden Plums)