`[Emily Critchley] has incorporated influences from popular culture and from a more street-wise feminist critique. Her poetry ... is combative, intellectual and probing but this seems tempered by an upbeat and more popular sense of engagement, which makes her unusual and interesting [...] a genuine form of public poetry, which can embrace both pleasure and critique without being either chic posturing or a sell-out to the market, such as it exists within poetry publishing! The thing I most enjoy about Critchley's poetry is the way in which she manages to suggest an ongoing sense of `self-dialogue' within her writing. Whether she's talking about love [...] or politics or art or academic work, there's always an inner-dialogue going on, a self-assertiveness questioned in the light of a relationship to the `public sphere'.' -Steve Spence
