Kate's first book of poems Milk Run published January 1, 1977 by Momentum Press turned 50 this year. 

Read: A Poet Recalls Her Youth

"I was writing my first poetry, my first of what would be the Milk Run poems. I read “Cobalt Blue” and everybody stood up and cheered. They didn’t just applaud enthusiastically. It was utterly kinetic. I could feel the room change temperature and I could feel trees in forests on other planets catch on fire.....That night at Beyond Baroque was my christening. Every one was clapping, they were cheering, and I felt my whole life was just beginning." - Kate Braverman 2008.

"To the best of my recollection, I was the first editor in the United States to publish Kate’s poetry. Kate was an ambitious poet, though, and certainly wanted her poems to be in the best known magazines at that time. Within a few months of that publication (the third issue of Momentum, 1974), she had poems accepted by the Paris Review. Not only did I continue to publish her work in Momentum magazine, however, I also published her first book of poems, MILK RUN. Reviewed in the Los Angeles Times by Ben Pleasant, the first run sold out fairly quickly, and I printed another 500 copies. I may not have published as many books as other independent presses did back then, but I somehow had a quirky ability to select poets who were destined to make an impact."-- Bill Mohr of Momentum Press, 2019, from Koan Kinship tribute to Kate. 

“This is, perhaps, the finest book of poems by a young poet writing in L.A. in the last five years. I doubt very much whether Kate Braverman is a feminist, but I am certain she is a woman with deep fears and longings and emotions. The fears are of cruelty and loneliness. The longings are sensual and sexual. The emotions span an entire spectrum from the joys of a lovely evening in Majorca, to beatings, being thrown down the stairs by a lover.

But what makes these poems special are their concrete images: words that floor the reader with their power, their drive. They contain the kind of energy one finds in Rimbaud and van Gogh’s pictures and in the writings of Charles Bukowski. An example: “I know you want / your fingerprints back, / the drops of water from the shower. / I have encased them in glass / our lives preserved, dusted / by eras and nuances of mood. / We orbit each other / finding a formality. / Not even our shadows collide.”

“This is a poetry of craft from a young fresh voice.”

-- Ben Pleasants, May 12, 1978

“Braverman’s poems in Milk Run seem directly based on the life of the author …. The strength of this writing is that the events have keenly affected the writer, and that she is direct and almost obsessive in her perceptions about her own pain and fragmentation, the loss of love, her transformations into strange creatures … Braverman avoids, though without much leeway, the poet’s need to romanticize madness, drugs, and the bruises of life …. She does this by means of style, writing simple, pared down sentences…. (Her) strength as a poet lies in the unblinking stare and in the subject matter and perceptions that reach for the daring.”
-- Martha (Lifson) Ronk, Bachy