"Forms of Gone is a powerful first book by a poet mature in experience and worldview, whose strength is drawn at once from a unique perspective and a multilayered engagement with the conterpoint of syntax and poetic measure. Yerra Sugarman is the daughter of Shoah survivors who settled in Canada, and her subject is the overlay and undertow of history on daily life, as it regards that very specific experience, radiating out into a meditation on the palimpsest that is any examined human existence. But first of all, there is the reality she witnessed, as the witnesses themselves began to disappear, with a novelist's (or a painter's) eye for wry or heartwrenching detail, but with a poet's linguistic compression and invention, with a poet's genius for re-creating the particular so that in the aftershock or reading, the reader becomes aware how much the text also captures a plight that is universally human."
—Marilyn Hacker

"In Forms of Gone, her brilliant first collection of poems, Yerra Sugarman writes of loss with a rare gift for transforming the particulars of daily experience into universal truths. The poems are memorable for the sheer beauty of their imagery. Although Sugarman delves into history, the present moment comes alive in her work with a clarity reminiscent of George Herbert and in a voice that is distinctively her own."
—Grace Schulman