Early Creatures, Native Gods (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)
These poems reveal a serious poet grappling with serious things, like faith and doubt . . . Hays refuses the stuttering reflexive mannerisms common in the current-contemporary style . . . as well as the ever-present romantic urge to chuck rationality and rely on the obscurities of emotion. She maintains intellectual control and restraint, her themes are important and universal, her phrasing is often sententious, her diction is pure, simple, and as austere as her imagination, and she accurately apprehends experience and conveys it as precisely as possible in free verse.--Rick Joines inAmerican Literary Review