“Pollak’s poetic technique is marked by economy of style, images conveying precise emotional tones, and ideas which are compellingly honest.”—American Book Review

“Art to conceal art, intelligence to gratify rather than bulldoze the gentle reader, an ability to take pleasure in the pleasurable, a recognition that many things in life do not change very much in spite of our wishes.”—Alicia Ostriker, Partisan Review

A bilingual edition of most of the poems in this collection was published in 1989 by Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt under the title Vom Nutzen Des Zweifels.