"She could be speaking about the passion that drives all of her poems when Mary Julia says in one of them, "Find a Mango, peel it with yourteeth.... " Her poems are unabashedly passionate. They go for the bone literally and figuratively. They're uncompromisingly honest: joyful, lonely, a celebration of loss and possibility. They're the juice that "drips into your mouth...." The body-mind for this poet is her church-imagination. Her poems, the bread of longing. What ordinary humans can not give her, inexplicably, her poems can. She works the outer world, mostly a 'night' world of dark, brooding imagery, but only to probe the inner one. It's the appetite of her poetry that astonishes. Poets have to find their metaphor for Mary Julia, it's the body, the way in always mysterious and always beautiful."

--Tom Crawford, Author of WU WEI

"Truth and beauty, Keats said, that's it, all we need. Reading Klimenko's truthful and intricate poems makes me aware of how rarely the two actually come together. Complex truth, down to the bone beauty, not surface beauty."

- Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun