"The shadow of ballad or hymn meter haunts Riley’s fragmented parts, as does the spirit of song itself, which for all its elegiac purposes can never not be a sign of vitality. In an interview with the Web publication The Shearsman Review, Riley remarked of her career: “The only constant is a commitment to the thing that is song. This is in some way linked to the persistence of hope. Then as I get older this whole business of ‘song’ only becomes still more mysterious. It is a plain bright mystery.” Song is in dialogue with the “say” of Say Something Back, enacted between loftier rhyming stanzas and colloquial blank verse. Rhymes and rhythms assert themselves, then falter. It’s stop and go, this resumption of life after death." Ange Mlinko The Nation

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