"In her brilliant collection Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts, Elizabeth Kirschner fearlessly blends poetry, prose, memoir, and master storytelling into an amalgam that lands like a gut-punch to the soul. I literally found myself taking a deep breath at the beginning and the end of each story, to both steel and re-orient myself. There is nothing easy about the magic Kirschner casts; rather, its complexity serves to illuminate the indomitability of the human spirit in those deep, dark places where it would seem no spirit could survive. This is a devastatingly beautiful book." (Laura Hurwitz, author of Disappear Home)

"Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts is a master stroke. Brimming with a hallucinatory spirit, these are less stories and more poetic and metaphysical voyages. In this collection, Kirschner gives voice to the disturbed and hopeful in her characters' psyches - penetrating the repressed, thrust into the sublime. In its earlier stories, Kirschner brilliantly reinvents the simile, with it granting every sentence a double-life; and the later sections prove not only beautiful in their prose, but with keen sense of narrative drive. A literary achievement, this collection rewards re-reading over and over again." (Jonathan Koven, author of Palm Lines and editor of Toho Journal)