Perhaps Paul Kareem Taylor said it best in his piece called On the Road Again: Barbara Hamby's American Odyssey: "Reading Barbara Hamby's poetry is like going on a road trip, one where the woman behind the wheel lets you ride shotgun as she speeds across the open highways of an America where drive-in movie theaters still show Janet Leigh films on Friday nights, hardware stores have not been driven out of business by soulless corporate titans, and where long poetic lines first introduced by Walt Whitman and resurrected by Ginsberg are pregnant with a thousand reasons to marvel at the world we inhabit." Even those who profess to dislike or fear poetry will find themselves bedazzled and uplifted by Hamby’s long-lined, subtly rhymed, sure-footed, take-me-to-the-bridge lyrics. Funny, nimble, knowing, deeply well read and nurtured by art, film, and music, and ebulliently imaginative, she is an adept storyteller-in-verse and juggler of juxtapositions, such as, in The Word, the biblical Noah and Aretha Franklin, the Buddha and Thomas Edison, sex and the atom bomb. There is so much motion in her poems. Hamby commands the page like a swing dancer takes the floor, a surfer rides the big waves, a skater swoops round the ring. Along with generous selections from her four previous collections, On the Street of Divine Love delivers resplendent, jazzy, capacious, rapturing new poems, in which Hamby writes of insomnia and prayer, hearing Lil’ Kim on a radio in Florence, and walking in Rome on that divinely named street thinking, I want a God / big enough to love those who don’t believe in him, / because isn’t it enough just to walk this world / with its psychedelic wah wah, its lightning storms and squalor? Amen. --Donna Seaman Barbara Hamby's poems are wild, outspoken, seriously funny, motor-mouth rambles that take us through hoops of association to places both unexpected and unimpeachable. This collection offers a generous helping of poems so crackling with references and busy with verbal energy you might feel them buzzing in your hands. ― Billy Collins Whether On the Street of Divine Love is the best book of poems in the world will long be debated by literary scholars (some stuffed shirts still put forth The First Folio or a Goldbarth title) but surely it is the world: snazzily beatific, unashamedly carnal, at sumptuous ease with both the down-home blues and the intellectual high life, sometimes porch sitting and sometimes globe-trotting, and always in love with life and with a multiplex language that proves the love, this book is a true blue spinning planet; maybe there are nine in our system after all! ― Albert Goldbarth On the Street of Divine Love bursts with Barbara Hamby's signature wit and verbal twists. If language were an Olympic sport―and why is it not?―Hamby would bring home the gold in bungee-jumping bobsledding, boogie-woogie boxing, and soul-searching curling. Her poems sparkle with their top-notch surfaces, then bring us deep into the gusto of life, the painful and ecstatic truths. Readers will want to linger On the Street of Divine Love. ― Denise Duhamel Her words whirl along the pages encased in a cyclone of metaphor and images, full of passion and reality. . . .Hamby's unconventional style causes page after page to turn and upon reading the last page of this selected poetry collection, the reader is left looking for more. She is a poet of energy, breathing life into words with passion. The way a poet should. ― Fox Chase Review Get ready for a wild ride when you dive into Barbara Hamby's 'On the Street of Divine Love.' You'll soon be roaring down avenues of the alphabet with a poet who is dazzled by―and a master of―our lingo. . . .The effervescent and all-encompassing nature of Hamby's poems give the reader a sense of discovery and vitality. ― New York Journal of Books Beyond their beautiful words, these poems are psychological expeditions, portals into complex layers of time and space―and not just the streets of Italy, Paris, and London where her speakers often find themselves. In Hamby's writing, memory, both personal and collective, is a constant layer over the present. ― Coal Hill Review Barbara Hamby's 'On the Street of Divine Love' is magnificent. Containing fifteen new poems and a distillation of her previous four collections, it should secure her place among the best American poets. Hamby is the master of the contemporary ode, many of which are included here, and the collection as a whole is an ode to words, not in a sterile, theoretical way, but in a way that is 'giddy with being alive'. . . . They are a feast ― Heavy Feather Review Hamby's poems are good-natured, gossipy, and fun . . . She attempts to render in verse the near chaos of perception that typifies human consciousness as it careers through a lifetime's worth of unruly accident . . . With its delight in sensuality and in the sensuality of speech above all, with its yoking together of serious and casual