"Exquisitely alert to the realities of natural environments, White’s book is among the most interesting of the new nature writing." Publishers Weekly
"In discussion with other writers, I’ve sometimes been referring to your work as a new approach to the pastoral, one that is, indeed, more risky, more open perhaps to the complicity of voice in poetry." Jamie Townsend conversation, Entropy
"I was a freelance writer and although I wrote about the garden several times for magazines and a museum catalog, I wasn’t satisfied with my writing. I wanted to write something that would make the reader superalert, the way the garden had affected me. So I learned how to write poetry." The Cultural Landscape Foundation interview
"Reflecting on her own creative process, Greene explains, “‘[I] wanted to get something inside me out’” (40). White’s creative impulse mirrors this: “I want to live in the green. And this wants out of me onto the page” (30). Inspiration is an internal response, beginning in the body, and Vigilance Is No Orchard carries the memory and charge of that initial breathless encounter." Anna Morrison, OmniVerse
"Greene’s words, both quotes from conversations and bits of what must be written communications, form a collage with White’s deliciously unpredictable lines. The dominant mode recalls Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s prose-influenced, abstracted style, but White is a collagist and a word-sculptor, who can deftly skid among registers.” Erika Howsare, [Pank]
"There is so much in the space between her words and her lines; an expansiveness, stretched out and across a wide canvas. There is also such a wonderful musicality, a flow, to White’s lyric.” Rob McLennan's Blog
So the starting point of this work, what could serve as a fixed landmark in navigating the text, is instead a floating buoy, rising, falling, drifting, sometimes even disappearing as I try to reference it. I find the disorientation invigorating. Mary Burger, Denver Quarterly