“Windy grassy ancient seabottom:  upper midwest beginning of the plains where the antelope played and the swan swam along then newcomer’s wheat farms and, sense of place?  Marquart gives us the place from every side—the earlier wild and  the now failing farms, both loved and abhorred,  no simple piety of place and work here—but another kind of sustainability is hinted at. Her writing-spare, sinuous, gnarly, sparky—and a life that's hands-on personal whether expert chores or runaway romance; painful but never self-pitying, hard-won illuminations. She enlarges the debate and transcends the dichotomies.  Here's where “wild” finally means free, and “nowhere” is another term for this world.”  —Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Turtle Island and Mountains and Rivers Without End

“Debra Marquart's The Horizontal World is one of those rare books that captures a landscape and the people in it with equal grace and artistry. At once a coming of age memoir and a portrait of the tough and cold and beautiful land upon which that growth occurs, this book is wonderfully accomplished."   —Brett Lott, author of  Jewell

 “Debra Marquart's prose is as flat as the land she so expertly renders in her stunning book The Horizontal World.  That "flat" is a good thing.  It's more tonic and sonic and as subtle as it can be.  You start out thinking that everything here is transparent, plain, known, but then the prose plys apart, splinters, revealing-layer after level layer-the depth right there all the time.  You begin to see this nothing for everythings it's got.”   —Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone and Alive and Dead in Indiana

“Marquart speaks loud and clear for the voices of the Great Plains that are too often silent. It is a point of view that is at once shocking and prophetic and one that can help bring focus to the dilemma of the grasslands. Read The Horizontal World and learn what the hungry wind feels like on your naked body.”  —Dan O'Brien, author of Buffalo for the Broken Heart