'I am chipping into the heart/ of a big, blank country,’ writes Pamela Steed Hill. With eyes wide open, this poet journeys through a land where ’The sun offers/ no true guidance; the past renders no certain light.’ Only poetry can tell us what we need to know. In Praise of Motels is a wise, lively guide to those travels the soul takes in the course of a life. ’How completely a map can fill up a room,’ Pam tells us. Yes, and how completely a book of exquisite poems can fill up the mind and heart of the reader who travels its pages. Read this book to discover where, even who, you are.

David Citino
Author of The Appassionata Poems and Broken Symmetry

In Praise of Motels is a work of movement and travel. What the narrator is after is the ’peace found only/ in driving,’ but what she finds is more complex, and more interesting. Seemingly paeans to ’the interstate and a11 its apostles,’ Pamela Steed Hill’s poems are also vivid and rich portraits of the uneasy junctures between our public and private worlds. The secret domestic space – the sacred and sexy roadside motel – is an in-between refuge where ’no one who knows us/ knows where we are.’ It is a credit to Hill’s considerable skill as a writer that she conveys the fragile balance between worlds, without denying the attractions or the constraints of either one. A new take on "the open road," this is a surprising and provocative book.

Maggie Anderson
Author of A Space Filled With Moving and Cold Comfort

Pamela Steed Hill’s poetry searches for what is sacred in all things. Through that process, connections are revealed that might otherwise have escaped us; images sharp as knives are used to pare back surfaces and reveal hidden, mysterious insides of moments we might otherwise have moved through blindly.

James Michael Robbins
Editor, Sulphur River Literary Review