by H.R. Coursen

Bob MacLaughlin's poems are warm, engaging, compassionate, often funny, and carry an edge that lesser poets smother in sentimentality. Nothing sentimental here. Bob's is a world of energetic encounters that sometimes knock him off his feet but never find him at a loss for the right word or the precise insight that captures the meaning of the moment his poetry brings alive.

by Ted Bookey

Bob MacLaughlin has an assessing gaze. He's an expert looker, an adept and affecting story teller who crafts beautiful narrative windows. Even in those poems memorializing his father's descent into the slow, horrific indignities of Alzheimer's, he is able to conjure a rich humor and lovingness, a vision of LIFE clapping its hands. I returned time and again to reread whole poems in the way one might press a finger to the crumbs littering an otherwise cleaned plate out of a desire to savor every morsel.

by Elizabeth Potter

Bob MacLaughlin reveals the beauty and yes, even the humor in subject matter we often try to hide from or place in a box of acceptable responses. He finds the soft spot and the smiles in our real life struggles and suffering by wielding the whole truth of his experience, even when some might call him irreverent. I would counter that this is poetry at its best, standing in the trenches with the poet experiencing the entire moment--tenderness and foolishness, bitterness and forgiveness, the ridiculous on sacred ground.