Beware! Ava C. Cipri’s Queen of Swords is not a straightforward book (or body) of poems. Not sequential. Not straight. Witness instead, a fluctuating non-binary body, a hybrid akimbo, an ethereal ghost, shivery in the awareness of its own naked multiplicity, its many losses (not lacking)—but vibrating its way into being—the book you imagined before you could read.     ~Pj Carlisle

Because Ava C. Cipri is an accomplished poet who also loves words, Queen of Swords uses a beautiful variety of poetic forms, including experimental verse, ghazal, and tanka, to weave a sensual spell. "…The void reshuffles the deck, your card from a sister life. / Poet, explain who sends these postcards from a sister-life? / Her fingernails leave quarter moons: night tears from its corners— / Even the landscape reassembles in a sister-life."     ~Angele Ellis