One would be hard pressed to discover another writer in America who has so entered the soul of his own neighborhood, the poetry in his past and sung his joy so exquisitely as David Kherdian in My Racine.
Norbert Blei
I found it delightful and without any of the pretenses or falseness in language that permeates so much of our contemporary poetry. The work is clean and spare, with all the virtues of intended simplicity. Lines like a Shaker Chair.
Tony Ardizzone
The title poem is one of the best lyric poems in American poetry.
William Saroyan
Kherdian’s lyrics are delicate sketches of life’s joys: his wife, their cat, their home in the country. His credo is “keeping it good and simple,” and his poetry provides a glimpse into a Thoreau-like existence. These poems convey not only sweetness but a sense of constancy and renewal.
Booklist
Kherdian celebrates freedom, innocence, tenderness. He shuns verbal pyrotechnics, experimentation, recondite, symbolism; refuses to prove anything, promise nothing. Look around you, he seems to be telling us, the world is a celebration; every moment a condensation of eternity filled with joy, beauty, and a truth that makes all philosophies irrelevant. Kherdian performs this minor miracle by employing the most ordinary means. At its best, a Kherdian poem has this in common with a Bach prelude; it is not only beautiful but an explanation of beauty.
Ara Baliozian
With simple and unassuming means, like one of the great Armenian artisans who built the acclaimed original Christian churches, he creates word by word, page by page, friend by friend, the very life of the neighborhood of his childhood and at the same time lets us see into the mind and spirit and heart of the poet himself.
Aram Saroyan