In voice-rich, era-evoking poetry, this autobiographical 'novel-in-poems' spans a century in the life of one broken, fierce, incendiary family. A mosaic of thwarted dreams and tangled loyalties, Embers is nevertheless always awake to the twin redemptive potentials of grief and recognition. Wolverton unerringly captures the moment when events stamp a character in such a way that decides the course not only of his or her own life, but all the lives they in turn create, resolving in the poet's own. Beginning with Huron tribal mythology and ranging through Detroit's salt-city frontier days and, in a particularly stunning suite of poems, its more recent and no less violent urban history, Embers creates an unforgettable portrait of a century, and a city, and a family struggling toward wholeness.
— Janet Fitch, author, White Oleander
Embers is at once dense and delicious, crammed with sorrow and drama, a marvelous American tale, a haunting work of art. The pure craft of the thing is fascinating and daunting. This is certainly Wolverton's masterpiece-- the poem, the novel, she was put on earth to write.
— Carolyn See, author, Making a Literary Life
The only way this poignant work could have been accomplished is from the other side, through distance, alchemy, love. There is elegant survival here, the widening of compassion; housefires set by individuals, and the larger conflagration of the Detroit race riots acts seeking reparation out of powerlessness. We have our phoenix as well, the voice of the writer moving through her history (and ours) into the present, masterfully re-creating her own mythos. Indeed, the reader is steeped in the coming together of American mythologies and grateful for this new one that sweeps across the dark and light, the snake and cradle of a nation's and a family's blood-and-bone survival. The cumulative effect of the poems is one of awesome respect for the human spirit. Wolverton's verse-novel is a force, essential in each of its separate parts, haunting in its relevancy.
— Maureen Seaton, author, Venus Examines Her Breast
As a novel, the poems of Embers tell many stories woven of fact and fiction, challenging all possible "master narratives". Native (Huron) history, working class tribulations, the Detroit riots, several generations' family trauma all combine to make Wolverton's embers glow with a driving passion. Above all, this book is a commitment to the beauties and scintillating particulars of a generous language. This is a tremendous weave of site and humanity.
— Anne Waldman, Co-Founder the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and author of Vow to Poetry.