I find little hilarity and a lot of demanding anguish in Transplants…. [Cynthia Macdonald] writes about the grotesque world of the abyss, whose populace are the lame, the blind, and the distorted…. Macdonald generally leads us to the "transports of passion" and if we recoil from this world gone wholly wrong we have only to remember we do the same before the horrible accidents of daily life. She creates poems that are, in effect, cauterizations, little tragedies whose bloodletting is always offstage and whose point is inevitably moral as well as blunt. Though she is perhaps too gratuitous in leaping this way and that ("I unwrap a package of needles without eyes and a package of / eyes without pupils") and occasionally lapses into the afflatus of poetry magazine poses ("Our dreams are filled with the bones of desire."), she is a no-nonsense poet who seems able to use everything in the service of art. (p. 33)