"Judith Baumel's intelligent and beautifully made poems bear witness to the dense interconnectedness of things. Baumel somehow manages to be a mistress of metaphor, a plain-spoken observer, and a meditative poet at the same time. In her work, each lived moment (Now) is more than just itself; rahter, travel friendship, family, art, death, history, cities are all enriched with antecedent and echoes, not to mention vivid imagery. I always look forward to this poet's work."  --Rachel Hadas

"Judith Baumel is one of the most gifted younger poets writing in this country. I think [NOW] is a tough and impressive work of art and I like the way that it is ferocious and tender and plainspoken and much more artful than it looks."  --Robert Hass

"The passionate and personal poems in Now, Judith Baumel's second collection, often unfold in long sentences that picture the world in sometimes harsh detail. But if they reflect an essentially troubled view of life, they also articulate a readiness to be astonished by beauty and heartened by love."  --Jonathan Aaron in The Boston Globe

"Unlike much of contemporary poetry, Baumel's meditative poems succeed in moving beyond the self without becoming either unbearably politically correct, or hopelessly mired in grandiosity and pretension. . . .The poet Mary Karr once said that poetry's aim is 'to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.' Baumel triumphs on both counts as she makes an uneasy truce with a world she finds impossible to accept."  --Robert McDowell in The Hudson Review

Judith Baumel is the author of one previous book of poems, The Weight of Numbers, which won the 1987 Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Criterion, The New Yorker, and The Threepenny Review, as well as several anthologies.

She teaches at Adelphi University and lives in the Bronx.