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"Pattie McCarthy sifts with nervy precision through the debris of spoken English as rendered in definitions and on public platforms from the Middle Ages to something like now. In "Table Alphabetical of Hard Words" she has developed a powerful poetic phrasing that can accommodate this history of diction while constantly asking what there is to know, from any angle the mind and body take. The book takes interest in distance as a kind of demi-subject (alongside orbits, childbirth, overhearing, reading, the generosity embedded within acts of stealing language from any source, joy and love) and breaks it down as it goes along, in a manner of speaking."
—Anselm Berrigan
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