"C. Violet Eaton’s second book, Quartet, is you. Let’s say it is the mechanism of you. I say this fully aware that a nest of confusion could ensue but that, of course, is the point. What Eaton performs so well in these pages is a direct dealing with the inevitability of the artifacts which, much to our chagrin, define us. These include all the material that makes our lives seem important and things like honesty, intention, and, that most ephemeral of all armors, story. To say that Eaton lands this language down the alley, while verifiably true, blunts its urgency. So let’s try this: Eaton’s language has all the magnetism of the choked inhale of a colicky infant or the slow suck of tires on wet asphalt as one awakens in a ditch. It is dangerous and invigorating."
—Lance Phillips

 
"Quartet’s rowdy odes and viscid fictions come “crawling out the coffin to perform” a crossroads cabaret—of rack and wit, vision and vinegar. They suggest there might be nothing as experimental as the folk tradition. There’s the barbershop quartet, the can-can dancers, the contortionist, the drugged bear on a bicycle, a Blakean polyglot scribbling riddles in the county ledger, and even 'the last man / On Earth singing the first / Song ever written.' Eaton’s poems offer 'rural harmonics' that crimp prophecy to pop songs, ecological desperation to the grace of murky accounting. Their heft is true, as though each line is a lodestone drawing the spirit closer so we can see the 'church, eventual' that hovers above this book’s surgically resplendent 'wire of song.'"
—Zach Savich