Claudia Gary’s exquisite formal techniques and rare candor create a panorama of decades in Time and Other Solvents.  This book is a propulsive read—each poem catapults to the next.  How does she combine an artistic mother’s electroshock therapy in the 1950’s with a daughter’s response—bulimia—then blend in half a century of current events?  From life in New York and L.A. to the Vietnam War as viewed from Paris, Gary guides us back to New York, psychotherapy, and the rescuing practice of art with motherhood.  She reveals her answers in poems illuminating an early passion for music that later becomes an adult’s embrace of poetry. Claudia Gary’s dexterity as a poet (she makes those sonnets and villanelles look as poised as an ice-skating routine) allows her honesty to unfold in layer after layer in a sweeping memoir-in-poems that I couldn’t put down.  —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst and The Widow’s Crayon Box