Berg won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection 2010, and was shortlisted for the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award 2010. Forward Prize Chair of judges Ruth Padel said: "We loved its wit, range and strength, the way that each poem is a complete world in itself, and moves you out to strange places. The poems are contemporary, varied and highly imaginative.


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Alison Brackenbury in PN Review says: "Her poems bring as powerful a sense of farm, animal and land as the best work of Ted Hughes. (They) set alight many senses."

Leah Fritz in Poetry Review says: "This is grown-up verse, able to take on the world."

Ben Wilkinson in New Welsh Review says: "Menos has a gift for combining broad reflections on the big themes with casual language and the contemporary clutter of the everyday, lending her poems an authenticity and the sense of a specific life lived. (Her) real skill emerges as a lyric poet addressing the emotional and spiritual complexities of the quotidian. A poet worth reading."

Helena Nelson in New Walk Magazine says: "Each of her poems creates its own small world: it is packed tight, seamless, masterfully compressed. At the same time, she has a light touch, a wry humour, a fine way of extending metaphor ... Make no mistake, Menos is a very good poet."

Carole Bromley in The North, no. 46, says: "Hilary Menos' Berg is a cracking read. I was expecting variety, humour and confident use of form and I wasn't disappointed. Menos takes us to the dentist, the supermarket, the slaughter house, the lunatic asylum and from Moscow to Havana, always with a sureness of touch and exciting use of language. A really unusual first collection and one which I enjoyed from cover to cover."

Caroline Clark for Gwales says: "She can be shocking, tender and very funny. This collection introduces a strong, original voice."

Charlotte Newman, for Eyewear Blog, says: "Menos's voice is very Padelesque: wild exoticism blunted with the rudeness of the modern urban world."