Review of Cold Pastoral in Kenyon Review Online:
“Dunham keenly navigates the responsibility of the poet. This tension—between the photograph and the poem, the statistical fact and the lyric, oracular utterance—is the tension of all great works of witness.” –Corey Van Landingham
Review of Cold Pastoral in Colorado Review:
“Dunham is interested in the coalescence among artistic purpose, beauty on earth, and the realization of one’s own mortality.” –Aram Mrjoian
Review of Cold Pastoral: “Poetry as Resistance and Remembrance” in Salamander
“Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Pastoral participates in the fluid field of documentary poetry. Dunham is a lyric poet whose previous collections have focused on interior spaces. In Cold Pastoral, she turns her gaze outward…” –Jacqueline Kolosov
Review of Cold Pastoral in The Los Angeles Review
“This is a book full of questions, implicating poet, reader, and corporation alike. It’s a book in which the poet can say, ‘Reading isn’t enough,’ but also ‘Who will document the crisis that bleeds on and on?'” -Danny Caine
Review of Cold Pastoral in American Microreviews & Interviews
“Dunham’s goal to teach the reader not to look away from tragedy is successful. Through her collection of poems, Dunham successfully evokes the feelings of shock and disappointment that are essential to make a change to the way humanity treats each other, themselves, and ultimately, the earth.” –Kelly Lucero
Review of Cold Pastoral in Wanderer
“Dunham’s poetry comes to us at a desperate time.” -Amanda-Elizabeth Abend
Review of Cold Pastoral in Meridian
“In Cold Pastoral, Rebecca Dunham assigns herself a difficult task—to document disaster in a way that will last—and yet she is fiercely successful in offering elegies that resonate on multiple levels: conveying a memory so that it appears vivid, honoring victims by investigating the details of their tragedies, and challenging the reader to recognize loss and remember it.” –Courtney Ferlage
Publisher’s Weekly Review of Cold Pastoral
“Dunham makes it clear that beyond her and others’ personal experiences, humans have become subject to a ruin of their own making: “The only thing worse than the disaster itself is what happens when the world decides it’s over,” she writes. ‘All fixed. It’s a fact any survivor knows.”
“40 New Feminist Classics You Should Read,” Literary Hub
“In this collection, Dunham calls upon classic feminist literary influences—Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Daphne de Maurier—to help her grapple with the contemporary experience of womanhood in sometimes lovely, sometimes gutting verse.” -Emily Temple
“25 Protest Poetry Collections to Read Right Now,” Bustle
“As one of the most anticipated (and most needed, IMO) poetry collections of 2017, Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Pastoral (available March 14) examines the man-made and/or human-influenced natural disasters of our time: the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, and the Flint water crisis. Dunham’s writing is edgy, powerful, and transformative, and she blends interviews and excerpts from government documents with pastoral poetic traditions.” -E. CE Miller