"Cassandra Smith creates a work that is of rare singular focus reminiscent of Roland Barthe’s A Lover’s Discourse. I remember my first reading of his book as a college student, finding myself both witnessing and being inside of love and of the book. I was in love with not a person but rather an idea, a concept, an inquiry of love itself. How did I find myself here again at 45 years of age? I am elated, grateful and perhaps even stricken for having read, for having received the gift of U&I. Beautifully written and contemplative, I cannot help but feel a sense of devastation upon arriving as a reader."

Truong Tran

"Cassandra Smith writes with the elegance, joie de vivre and brutality of a unicorn."

Bhanu Kapil

"u&i adeptly traverses the ethereal and radiant boundaries between 'to leave the meadow very alone' and to wander as a unit, to twin, to see in tandem. Is it possible to sustain a dual-vision when the 'simple logic of one or two' is never simple? What happens when one is divided from oneself, from one’s other? When the notion of beloved becomes impossible or impossibly near? In this delicate series of meditations, which read like dream confessions, Smith adroitly excavates conundrums of dualism and adheres to the project of constant address or gesture toward an ever elusive 'us.' Is the 'we' to which one cleaves a mythical species? This book is a lovely secret beginning and ending in a wood—a rare book of vanishing devotions to unknowing."

Laynie Browne