"This collection is so sensory and so full of lively detail that it’s easy to miss how elegiac it is. There’s great loss here—of childhood innocence and security, of home and family. In the haunting sequence of prose poems that give the book its title, the homeless 'woman who lives without money' literally loses (or gives up) everything. But loss is less a subject for grief than a path toward greater understanding. In 'Indistinct,' the speaker who 'longed for perfect sight' comes at last to embrace the “soft, mysterious,/and imperfectible world.' And although loss and tragedy confront us every day, 'Testimony' concludes that 'anyone who notices the world/ must want to save it.' Throughout this collection, Rebecca Baggett saves the world over and over again."
—Eric Nelson, author of Some Wonder and Terrestrials

"In Rebecca Baggett’s latest collection, we meet not only the woman who lived without money, but a host of other strong women. From Georgia O’Keefe, whom the poet imagines 'seeing the music, elegant hands translating / it to color, swirl, line' to teachers who opened new worlds as they read after-lunch stories; from her reliable, mothering aunts to her grandmother, who 'knew too well / what happens to those who look back,' and to the poet herself, who tells her daughters 'that anyone who notices the world / must want to save it,' Baggett shows us how to survive 'unnatural disasters,' yet remain open to beauty. She assures us in language accessible but fresh, evocative yet comforting that 'no one / makes it through this world intact, / and that’s okay.'"
—Clela Reed, author of Or Current Resident and Word Bully

"Rebecca Baggett’s The Woman Who Lived Without Money, in its precision of image and sensitive insight, illuminates the joys and sorrows of the quotidian: the grandmother who marvels that the poet writes about 'people before they died'; the frighteningly abusive father; the honeymooners shivering in their 'layered long johns'; the dangerously cavalier teens, 'fools cupped in God’s hands,' out late in a fast car; and, of course, the vicissitudes of the title character who finally leaves everything, even 'her name, the syllables of which dragged at her heels for miles.' Rebecca Baggett’s fine work should be celebrated by all who love language and what it can do to effect profound human communion."
—Sarah Gordon, author of Distances and The Lost Thing (poetry) and Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination and A Literary Guide to Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia