"With her three-part alchemy of plain speaking, suddenly perfect metaphors, and explosive, morally anchored last lines, Cindy Frenkel portrays a family in The Plague of the Tender-Hearted. From the witty to the elegiac, the poems quest for the why beneath a brother’s suicide and examine the underside of prosperity. But the marvels of this collection are the sassy buoyant poems of love for a daughter and unexpected love after divorce. Frenkel uses memory, the dynamics of aging parents, and the legacy of the Holocaust to pierce us with her bullseye poetic one-liners. The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, with its gem-like rhymes, is both an exploration and a revelation."

"The poems in Cindy Frenkel’s chapbook The Plague of the Tender-Hearted sear and delight. There are the brave, wrenching poems reanimating her beloved brother who took his own life. There are poems that sing with painful memory and even more painful love. There is the poignant poem spanning three generations of women, a trefoil of “roles reversed, everything askew.” Frenkel’s four-line “Elegy” is as powerful in its brevity as her "Anatomy of Color,” an ode to spring that unfurls over two pages. I cannot decide which I favor more, “This has been” or “Raising her is better than.” The former is a poem to her lover; the latter a love poem to her daughter. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose. The Plague of the Tender-Hearted will rest on my nightstand for quite a while."

"In The Plague of the Tender-Hearted, Cindy Frenkel makes her way through the maze of family death, divorce, and even a brother’s suicide without ever losing the ability to embrace joys small and large. Despite heart-rending troubles, there is still beauty in the natural world, the discovery of an unlikely new love, and moments with a beloved daughter when night 'stars spill out, / enough to occupy the universe.'"