"Rebecca McClanahan’s The Intersection of X and Y is a quiet, powerful book--like good southern bourbon--about lovers and families and all those unexpected turns our lives take. Ms. McClanahan, deft and sly, narrates tales where they kiss and tell and love remains at the center of everything. Old subjects, old songs, maybe. But oh the difference in the right poet’s hands, and Rebecca McClanahan makes a marvellous difference in these poems." -- Dave Smith

"We’d like to be able to plot our lives like graph coordinates, to be here but not there, this but not that. But the truths of our lives are messier, more jumbled, never only dictory but also contradictory. These truths are braided with the truths of the lives of our kin, friends, spouses. With rueful glee Rebecca McClanahan picks up the cacophonous snarl these truths make, and praises it. These open-eyed poems, scanting no loss or error we have made, are full of the stunned pleasure of being alert, and offer that gift to their lucky readers." -- William Matthews