“Funny, smart, sophisticated, guileless: reading Czaga is like drinking a glass of water in a desert. Every once in a while there arrives a young poet whose astonishing aptitude for the craft rises so clearly, so beautifully, the relief is palpable. For Your Safety Please Hold On is Czaga’s answer to Moure’s Domestic Fuel and Solie’s Short Haul Engine… and like Moure and Solie we don’t need to expect great things from her. Great things are already here.”–Elizabeth Bachinsky
“Kayla Czaga’s For Your Safety Please Hold On recalls what was radical about Robert Lowell’s Life Studies a half century ago. With wit and empathy, it moves beyond the confessional to reclaim the intimate and personal as an adventurous subject for poetry. Reading it is like being brought into someone’s home and told all the family secrets–never an imposition, it feels rather like an initiation into the clan. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”–Paul Vermeersch
“Expansive, precocious, melodic and radiant, Kayla Czaga’s poetry simmers with joy and a quickened curiosity. This is poetry that pokes the stuff of earth with a stick, that overturns the stone to see what lies beneath–and then sings about it. Whether playfully deconstructing the mythic stature of Stalin or meditating on the nature of girlhood imagination, Czaga possesses a voice that is honest to the bone and an imagination lit up like an illuminated manuscript. … To read one of her poems is to zigzag between heartbreak and hilarity.”–Carla Funk, Arc
Praise for Kayla Czaga’s poem “gertrude stein loves a girl,” as winner of the Malahat Review’s 2012 Far Horizons Award for Poetry:”Playful, sprightly, shifting among tones of exuberance, irony, and sorrow, the poem fuses subject and form. Both meditation and enactment, it fizzes and twists in its trampolining cadences, its deft (and often funny) repetitions and turns, its sometimes startling diction. It creates a sense of irrepressible energy, even as the lineation suggests restriction.”–Mary Dalton, author of Merrybegot