“Carol Matos explores the multitude haunting pauses, which rob language and make any spoken sentiment empty in her wonderful collection “The Hush before the Animals Attack”. The speakers in her collection do not reflect upon the chosen quiet instances in life, the deliberate silent states brought on by reflection or convention, but instead make vivid those vast in between spaces which singularly steal our voices in times of hurting or want, longing and memory.”

“These poems hold tight to the obsessions that endure when precious life is pummeled.”

“These fraught and urgent poems inhabit the anticipation implied by “before” as well as the uneasy minefield of recollection’s “after.” Narrative here fragments and reassembles as it is pressed into service to convey trauma, terrors, longing, and absence. Matos selects her details as a surgeon chooses instruments: this makes for a poetry of precision and necessity that probes with no easy consolation but with great intimacy and depth.”

“Carol Matos’ poetry is restless and relentless, a brave, sometimes raw, always deeply felt exploration of the physical and emotional experience of desire and longing, of sexuality, of love and of loss.”

“This collection is a rare combination of intensity and intimacy, terror and lyricism. The voices that interest Matos are untamable-they contain suspense as they wrestle with sexuality, aging, and the all-too-familiar emotion of fear when tragedy looms. The centerpiece of the book is a series of elegies, which trace the unbearable grief of losing a loved one. While they don’t offer comfort, they offer companionship. Although the title poem is not an elegy, the poems admit that life is hard but the defiant keep going. You might be winded by the poems’ collusion of beauty and violence, but you will not shy away from them.”