"Milk Dress is a meticulous chronicle of devotion and terror, love and responsibility. To watch a poet with a poet's skill address what is that which without which we would have nothing is exhilarating and what we have poetry for."—Dara Wier
"...a carefully constructed book...of elegant restraint."—Stride Magazine
"...luminous...easily recognized by any woman who has clasped her children..."—Santa Barbara Independent, Poetry Pick for the Holidays
"[Milk Dress] strives carefully and deliberately to bring together the whole of its narrative, while pausing for just the right click of the shutter, just the right brush stroke at each image..."—New Pages
"[Cooley] fuses intense feeling and scrupulous form like the best poets—think of Dickinson and Yeats—and knocks the reader out in poem after poem, evoking tears and wonder in equal amounts."—George Held
"Lush, pensive work..."—The Library Journal
“With gorgeous, formal control Nicole Cooley names the powerful ways in which a writer/mother is bound to history, beauty and inevitable loss. Here is a sensibility willing to inhabit terror and to make of that consciousness poems that are perfect marvels of poise and urgency, and that insist on rescuing words, hope, and meaning from oblivion.”—Lia Purpura
“These are poems of birth and motherhood. They begin with a new life and end in a new self. They probe deep into the places where love extinguishes identity and yet renews awareness. What is so compelling here is that the arc of this journey is described with such music, craft and rigor in this wonderful collection.”—Eavan Boland
