“Baba Yaga jumps the Brighton line in this rambunctious debut by poet and astrologer Mukomolova.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch’s house without protection and sit down at her table.”
—Diane Seuss
“Danger and vulnerability are ever-present in this debut collection, in which the mythic and the mundane strike against each other until something wholly other, a fire or a song, ignites.”
—Academy of American Poets
“What sets Mukomolova’s poems apart is her appreciation of dyke beauty, an erotic beauty that is as gorgeous and gruesome as a whole hand unfurling inside a body like a tulip.”
—Bomb
“Without Protection is a wildly free and vulnerable collection in which no part of ecstatic, feminine pleasure or ache is taboo.”
—Airea D. Matthews
“Grab a copy of [Mukomolova’s] ferocious, ecstatic, thrumming collection, which vibrates with a divine feminine energy, an exquisite ache. . . . It's a feverish take on a fairy tale, and its ferocity lingers long after you've read the collection's last words.”
—Nylon
“A raw, unfiltered glimpse of different aspects of her world—which includes the beautiful, the vulnerable, and the sordid.”
—Prism Review
“An inquiry into what it means to live and love in a shared world . . . a set of poems that manages to be colossal and little all at once, personal and universal.”
—The Adroit Journal
“Constructed from an archive of fragments (ephemera, email, voicemail), fairy tale, and stories, Mukomolova makes a world from the disparate scraps of a life lived, a world that she can embody.”
—Cynthia Cruz
“Gala Mukomolova’s a Baltic Sea witch, and her poems are vulnerable, ferocious, sex-soaked, gems sharp-edged enough to cut. For Mukomolova, names are spells, and all the thousand shapes of love are Without Protection’s fierce gravity.”
—Gina Balibrera Amyx
“A young woman named Vasilyssa—buffeted by the brutal vestiges of tradition, by the animal frustrations of the body—sits at a table belonging to Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch-crone. For many of us, the encounter that follows may seem familiar.”
—Benjamin Quinn, Harvard Book Store
“An intimate exploration of the dichotomy of the experienced and perceived self, the duality of Mukomolova’s conservative Russian heritage and queer contemporary Jewish Americanness, and the strain within modernity between the mundane and the wondrous.”
—Lila Weller, Weller Book Works
“Gala Mukomolova's poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. . . . These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye."
—Dawn Lundy Martin
