Review of Goodbye to the Orchard, by Deborah Bogen
"Cramer means to articulate a complex deeply human problem: how do we see real life with its trauma and inevitable catastrophe as worthy of celebration and allegiance?"
Review compendium of Goodbye to the Orchard | Sarabande Books
"Cramer actually grew up in an uncultivated apple orchard, full of inedible fruit that even the insects eschewed. That proximity to paradise, paradoxical as it is, lends his poems a bittersweet longing, a sweet kind of sadness.”
Review of The World Book, by H.L Hix | Ploughshares, Spring 1993
"Cramer’s poems fight sentiment with our only available weapons: knowledge and integrity. His work recognizes and confronts the stupidity of adolescence, the ambiguity of political action, the facelessness of death, and the selfishness of grief. And ultimately, the poems, rather than succumbing to sentimentality, achieve intimacy."
