“A salute to Neil Young’s enduring prophecy, “mother nature on the run,” but it’s scarier now—it’s not the 1970s. Claire Caldwell is an environmental doomsayer, but she’s also a comedic, antic storyteller, and she’s great at dark endings. Wilderness women are her storytellers; they speak with the melancholy of country music. “One day, I vanished,” says one. Another says, “To wear the moon like a breast.” From actresses fording a river: “Applause had softened us.” Nothing soft about these poems.”—John Irving

​​”Gold Rush conjures images of women exploring the natural world, pushing against stereotypes embedded in Canadian “frontier” stories… Here women take up their rightful space.”—Kim Fahner, Herizons

“Caldwell manages a feat many poets attempt and few achieve: making pop culture imagery actually work to emotional affect… Caldwell’s always adept at fun but exact imagery: “Sometimes the day / is a dead trout / and night slams over it / like a cooler’s lid.” Who hasn’t had one of those days?”—Winnipeg Free Press

“There is something in Caldwell’s candour, verbal energy, and her roving eye for material that made me smile often, that reinforced my hope in language and the peculiar clarity of poetry… Caldwell always let her wit, plus the imagery and connections of poetry do their wonderful work.”—The Fiddlehead

“Claire Caldwell’s second collection starts with a mammoth shinbone, stored in her parents’ garage. And it gets weirder and more ordinary from there, from the erasure poem Caldwell created from the diaries of homesteading women, full of longing and disconnection, to the epic anti-nature poem “How to See Moose.” Caldwell reminds us, magically, savagely, that we have celestial bodies but, also, that we are all meat. My only response? ‘Oh, yes, this.'”—Ariel Gordon