"McDaniel also unleashes language in her strategy of resistance to the deadening impact of conformity. Pockets of Silence, like Lead Diary or Letter to a Young Poet, uses the open-ended, autobiographical nature of words to contradict the depersonalized language of abstraction; words, like clothes, negotiate the space between public and private. Sure, these words are grudging - "shy," "unspoken," "silence" - but they are not mute. Their sotto voce, an inarticulate rumbling beneath the surface, marks the uneasy space where the self struggles to assert itself."

- Miles Unger, New Art Examiner, 1996