Reading Berryman to the Dog is Wendy Carlisle's first full-length collection of poems. Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel and What Have You Lost, had this to say about it:

The poems of Wendy Taylor Carlisle are vibrant, original, intelligent, tough, funny, and sharp as a first-time blade. I admire them utterly. They do not contain a single extra word. They have the power to transport, to remind, in all the best senses of that word, re-mind, to uplift and enlarge the mental faculties to a finer degree of sensibility. As a fellow Texan, I appreciate the heat and summer here. That's one lucky dog.

Calder Lowe, editor of the Montserrat Review, said this about it:

Reading Berryman to the Dog is a spectacular collection. These poems are fresh and fierce and consistently splendid in syntax, image, and emotional range. Be forewarned, however. As readers exposed to Wendy Carlisle's alternatively haunting and edgy associative trajectories, be prepared to be rode hard and put away wet as you undertake a breakneck journey through the unforgiving terrain of loss, betrayal, and bittersweet longing. There is a fiery resonance, an urgency, a wild and maverick impertinence in these poems that is downright addictive.

And Philip Dacey, author of The Deathbed Playboy and The Paramour of the Moving Air, said:

This is a hot book that invites the reader back for loving with a slow hand. I like its combination of the visceral and the smart. The frequent emphasis on the human body is appropriate, as teh body of each poem is strong, substantial, with its dense and rich texture, its local pleasures. Reading Berryman to the Dog is consistent, all of a piece tonally, texturally. There's a certain integrity about the whole while the poems keep pushing into new territory, they don't stop and cultivate a garden or consolidate gains, they're hungry.

Reading Berryman to the Dog is availible from Jacaranda Press, 1963 Josephine Ave., San Jose, CA 95124. It is $15US. You can reach Jacaranda Press at 408-377-7382.