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"If in the space between mutter and Mutter a dying language is born, what is borne there – in the constant opening of carrying over, in the resonant silence of a mother and child reunion – is the sound space/practice room of Pan-African speech, which animates the gift from Esther Kondo Heller that you hold now in your hands. Held now in the violent conservatory that you hold, new tongues in your mouth, new flavors in your ear, are you in disarray? Yeah! It’s her loving (re)arrangement of the collective head." ~Fred Moten

"Ar:range:ments is miraculous in its ability to attend to silence and absence in such a way as to invite, at every juncture, a form of visitation. Esther Kondo Heller’s deep lyrical listening and rapt seeking prove that grief is love that persists across all manner of distance. In these poems, grief becomes a gathering ground." ~Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate and author of Life on Mars

"Memory is the poem we live, not the poem we choose. Here, Esther Kondo Heller has offered a lost and found—a catalog of wondering—in which we can find the edges of our own losses and our own reach for language. Spend time here. Know that the space here is space for you, wide with the absences you hold." ~Alexis Pauline Gumbs

"In Arrangements by Esther Kondo Heller, words in their reminders and remainders transmute: in mutter is contained the mother, the mumble, the muted, the utterance; and in any image crossed with text there is the potential of performance. This is poetry that does not describe but acts, lives, and knows. Perfectly arranged, this collection powers and glides." ~Poetry Northwest

"Ar:range:ments—a recognizable English word ever so slightly deranged by punctuation, challenging the eye but neatly parsing syllables for the ear—is the title of Esther Kondo Heller’s first book. It’s also an apt label for the visuoverbal works they create: page-ranging ar:range:ments of image and text, quotation and collage, English and German and Swahili and the stray graphemes that flake off of them." ~LitHub