Diane di Prima gives us a rare opportunity to view the Beat Generation and its subsequent journey to the East through a woman's eyes.
—Bill Zavatsky, New York Times, 1976

Where there was a strong writer who could hold her own, like Diane di Prima, we would certainly work with her and recognize her. She was a genius.
—Allen Ginsberg, Boulder Camera Magazine, July 1989

a few people like her get made every few thousand years, in order to highlight the dullness of the rest.
—Andrei Codrescu, The Baltimore Sun, May 1983

Ms. di Prima runs without faltering into the realm of myth making. . . . With images that flash with clarity and brilliance of color in the mind’s eye, Loba paces back through time to femaleness as an element in the galaxy.
—Berkeley Gazette, November 1978

Growing up in the fifties, you had to figure it out for yourself—which she did, and stayed open—as a woman, uninterested in any possibility of static investment or solution. Her search for human center is among the most moving I have witnessed.
—Robert Creeley, March 1973

The proof of Di Prima’s work lies in its moods and perceptions, which are not frozen within the Beat environment; anyone can identify.
Gene Detro, San Francisco Examiner

The gathering in one volume of the eight parts of the Loba sequence offers the opportunity for an overview of di Prima’s ambitious construct, which directs itself essentially toward an epic realization of the female principle.
—Armand Schwerner, The American Book Review, June 1980

She has an ear thank heaven, a sense of the lyric that places her among the best.  How few poets can write a sentence! But di Prima reels them off long sinuous sentences. . that move when they should move and stop when they should stop. . . she is eloquent. . and she delights in grammar, the living grammar that will keep her poems memorable long after her cacophonic siblings have coughed themselves into silence.
—Hayden Carruth, Bookletter, June 1976

A founder and editor of several of the most significant Beat journals, organizer of some of the original poetry readings, an accomplished and prolific poet whose relative obscurity compared to the men with whom she is usually associated is something of a scandal today.
—Alix Kates Shulman, The Village Voice, 1989

A true sage-poet.
—Gary Snyder

Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s’ Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics; a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated, and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. A great world poet in the second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.
—Allen Ginsberg

ON LOBA:
The Loba poems are an epic act of language, a great geography of the female imagination.
—Adrienne Rich

I’m glad to have Loba. They are old incantations made new in our living flesh.
—Muriel Rukeyser

In the twentieth century, Woman has liberated herself from the pedestal upon which she has been set up,’ mostly by men. Loba enthrones her again, only this time it is done by herself.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

There’s primal magic at work here. Diane di Prima pulls readers and hearers of Loba into the center of Yin, and imbues us with life power.
—Maxine Hong Kingston

Loba is a mysterious compelling poem or series of poems whose vision of the female godhead is precise, ever changing, even deepening. It incorporates ecstasy and rot, all the forms of the female experience from birth through death, transmuting them into poetry that seizes the imagination. Diane di Prima has borrowed from many mythologies to create her own luminous myth of the wolf goddess.
—Marge Pircey

Loba is an actual touchable visionary poem of sentience and myriad-minded mammal nature. Loba is about points and swirls of energy, about alchemy, and about the biology of imagination. It all happens in the real, ever-arising universes.
—Michael McClure

My response to Loba is one of awe and gratitude. Blood-drenched and liberating, this is a poem for the ages.
—Robert Hunter

This epic poem is a radical classic—truly original, imbued with the raw, the wild.. the feminine. . . a re-cultivation of inspiration through strength.
—Joan Halifax

These oracular poems sing out in testament & celebration of fierce formic psyche & wisdom, The Loba-cycle is a potent mythic adventure everyone should experience.
—Anne Waldman

The poem induces a lovely experience of this world as exactly another world; it would retrieve the world for women. I’ve very pleased to welcome it in its entirety so far.
—Alice Notley

I love this book. Its one to travel with. Wander through, growl, fall down and get up again. People and poets can only be grateful that Diane di Prima’s illuminated and gnarly words are beating through American poetry.
—Eileen Myles

Aphrodisiac and meditation, a sumptuous celebration of body and mind, Loba exalts the mutable world with fragrance and fire. It is a brilliant imagined book.
—Rikki Dticornet

ON RECOLLECTIONS OF MY LIFE AS A WOMAN:

It's her very finest writing.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
 

Recollections of My Life as a Woman is a brilliant and disturbing book. Because it is so unashamedly personal and true, it will disturb all those who lived that passionate time when theatre and poetry, love and revolution seemed at last conjoined. And those who have not lived that stirring time will stand amazed at the creative world that Diane di Prima’s life embodies.
—Judith Malina
 

Diane di Prima is bona fide root-stock. An amazing creative force, Diane was and remains a major talent, and an inspiration, and this book is either a wonderful first dip into her life and mind, or a source text for a deeper understanding of her fastidious and magical poetry. For me, it’s both, and a rare treat. I urge readers to make her acquaintance.
—Peter Coyote
 

A bountiful, blessed book! Using words like wants, the poetess leads us through her early formative years in the creative heart of New York’s artistic world. This is a defining autobiography for a certain section of the twentieth century.
—Jean Houston
 

Recollections of My Life as a Woman was wonderful for me personally to he able to reminisce again about old friends, McClure, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, among others. This is a must read for women, poets, and people looking for a way to define their life’s work. A romp of a read! I loved it.
—Dennis Hopper
 

No writer of fiction could create a tale to equal the incredible story of Diane di Prima’s journey through life. She shares with us her struggles and triumphs, painting an unforgettable portrait of people and places that make the reader feel like a traveling companion on her life’s journeys. One of the enduring poets of the Beat Generation, her strength of spirit and honesty shine through every page of this memoir.
—David Amran