– Jim Wayne Miller

"These are fine poems. What can one say about fine poems more than that, except to add that they are often beautiful and moving! One could talk hours without saying more. This rich weave of family and cultural matters, with its right sort of ambiguities and ambivalences – right because they are so genuinely human – is so skillfully handled one forgets everything else but the poem, as it moves on the page, there being no need to consider anything else but what the poem is saying and doing in the time of the saying. These pieces touch on cores, hearts of matters as naturally as the flicker touches on his own concerns just outside my window at the moment, needling the grass for his Sunday breakfast.... They belong to a less lyrical time perhaps, but to a sturdier, more contemplative time. They are the heart of the matter for any man who feels the need of roots in his living, and of continuities and continuances."

– George A. Scarbrough

"Vic Depta is an original, at once cerebral and sensual, street smart and mountain wise. He has been writing well-crafted, challenging, lovely poems for years, and A Doorkeeper in the House represents his most ambitious work to date. The multiple voices, the rich imagery, the dazzling play of ideas, the emergent sense of a family and a place make this a distinctive, truly memorable book."