"When one says, 'hell yeah'—recognize your interlocutor has presented you with a philosophical couplet. You can cut it either way, like Rachelle's poems do: fierce drift in anticipation, affirmative unraveling, heat spiked with tenderness. You're being called into a shared architecture for how impossible it's been feeling in our declarative abstractions. 'So what if love is my form,' she asks, she poses. It's just not clear. So what. Jutting up against one another: 'It’s crazy // when you think about it.' Think about it—or don't. Hell Yeah is viral in the social neon. So think about it. Toarmino's got it."

—Nick Sturm

"Rachelle Toarmino is a very gifted poet, and Hell Yeah is a stunning collection. The poems in it are at once assured, restless, generous, loving, funny, plaintive, and high-octane. They are inviting—they attract, rather than declaim. With her uncanny sense of clarity, Toarmino's poems miraculously unfold line by line to enlarge thought while burrowing deeper into feeling. They constantly expand the world. They don’t look away."

—Peter Gizzi

"Say yes to Rachelle Toarmino's Hell Yeah. Commonplace, profound, and vibrant, these poems sing into the wild gap between our earthly selves and the wider world to prod at the interval between knowing and not knowing. 'What can be done with hurt / when I hum it into arrows / between two dreams / and breathless like an ellipsis.' Witty, vulnerable, smart, and dazzling."

—Hoa Nguyen

"The brilliance of this book is that Rachelle Toarmino delivers something you did not come for but that you are forever grateful to have. 'They say a body is no good at finding locations of injuries if they're inside it.' That's what I'm talking about: a poet who knows how to tell you you're no good at locating injuries and to study your living while you love inside the injuries. What a fantastic book this is! I want everyone who loves poetry to read it!"

—CAConrad

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"This powerful lyric poem moves dynamically from the embodied immediate ('This is my body take it') to a more expansive collective ('I can't keep myself to myself'). Line by magnetic line, this utterance gathers force. There is pain here, dysphoria, antagonism, and history. There is music. And yes, there is beauty. But the speaker never rests or waits in any of these elements; instead, she embraces abundance. Her '[m]usic is touching.' Listen."

—Claire Marie Stancek on selecting "Hell and Back" as winner of Omnidawn's 2024 Single Poem Broadside Contest 

"Like branches of a tree, these poems enlarge the relationships and tensions of being human. We might enjoy the petals cascading down the page or, more likely, stand in awe as those same branches rub together and ignite. 'So what if love is my form,' one poem affirms. Elsewhere, 'tradition' and 'constraint' coalesce with urgency and the deeply personal. I admire these poems for their inventiveness and vulnerability, as well as their record of the conscious mind: 'Love gets me out of the house / Love always gets me / out of the house...' Like the best writing, these poems allow us to revel anew in their craft—and their consequence—with each reading."

—Michael Robins on selecting Rachelle as winner of the 2023 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets

"These lines hold so tightly their objects of desire that they melt within the heat of the poem's grasp. Here, dream logic is more real than the waking mind, whose rationality cannot be trusted: 'I think / I dream myself' reads the poem 'Normal Neurotic'—not 'I think therefore I am.' The erotics of lyric fragmentation is a force that reshapes sense: 'The sentence pulled back by its hair...'—the line only intensified by its passive construction—'settles into a miraculous / decoy for sense.' These poems feel their way into existence, the 'freakish heart' wanting what it wants." —Kristen George Bagdanov on selecting Rachelle as runner-up for the 2023 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry

"Sinewy, conversational, and playfully quotidian, there's a forlorn charm in these reluctant love poems."

—James Haug on selecting Rachelle Toarmino as runner-up for UMass Amherst's 2023 Best New Poets Award