What is gay about the weather? Queer about gardening? Feminist about recovery? Lesbian about every piece of art? The poems in Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians move through the natural world, the political moment, literary lineage, and a domestic space built piece by piece by two wives, to claim their rightful place at the center of poetry itself. Santalucia’s perceptive, erudite poems poured themselves out all over my lap, implicating me. These are my favorite kinds of poems, full to bursting. Would the mentors and guides and ghosts referenced in these poems—many of them situated at the center of heteropatriarchal midcentury America—be able to clock Nicole Santalucia’s radical, full flowering?  Maybe.  Poetry has always been a complicated paradise, and we are lucky to have a new way in.

 — Laura Cronk, author of Ghost Hour

Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians is a book about translation (“I have translated Sappho into ladybug”) and transformation where “the difference between naked and nude is candied fruit.” The poet inhabits an animated queer universe where creatures and objects speak, and her own fluid being shifts shape in songs of cohabitation. It is also a book about gardening, growth, and the people and ideas that nourish us. In fact, it is a sort of cookbook where Santalucia combines bitter, sour, salty, and sweet words with wit and wild originality for maximum poetry umami. This collection has something to satisfy even the most discriminating literary palate.

 — Elaine Equi, author of Out of the Blank

Nicole Santalucia’s Lesbian Dinosaurs / Dinosaur Lesbians is a sustained, irreverent celebration. This surreal, wildly imaginative and wildly associative collection pays tribute to queer ancestors and traces a poetic lineage to Sappho, Mary Oliver, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, Robert Duncan, and Ashbery again, among many others. All the while Santalucia insists on a new post-confessional poetic full of absurdist humor, wit, and probing insight. Often prose-driven and accessible even it its wilding, the work is part chiastic rewriting, and part unspooling manifesto that foregrounds lesbian power and joy while queering heteronormative culture and discovering the primal, fablelike interconnectedness of species, environment, and art. A great read. An ambitious, daring, and unsettling achievement.  

— Peter Covino, author of What Sex Is Death, Dario Bellezza, Selected Poems