SOURCE: A review of Restless Serpents, in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. V, No. 10, Spring-Summer, 1977, pp. 152-54.

Juan D. Bruce-Novoa, who frequently writes under just his surname, is a distinguished Hispanic poet and critic. In the following review, he offers a laudatory assessment of Restless Serpents, noting thematic and stylistic aspects of the collection.

[In Bernice Zamora's Restless Serpents, the] restless serpent is sign, heart, and being of a world fraught with meaning always just beyond our rational grasp, a little too ambiguous to be nailed down, too unsettling to be comfortably defined and forgotten; in others words: poetry, language that creates itself as the surface upon, by and in which the ineffable can manifest itself in the world.

What attracts me in Zamora's poetry is that in spite of the directness of the voice and its worldly substance, something escapes, like the mystery of the penitent rituals...