Part of the reason may be the intensity and unfashionability of her poems. Jarrell said that her work had "the guaranteeing and personal queerness of a diary," and many others have remarked on its uniqueness and strangeness. Her poems often describe a process of seeing and present a tide of images and ideas associated with the object seen. Lee Upton, the author of the only critical study of Garrigue's work, remarked on her "restless eye": "the eye is as the self pouring over surfaces and in effect 'reading' them," and many critics have observed the extravagance of her imagery. Her friend and sometime lover Stanley Kunitz described her as one "whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom. She was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home." Garrigue's poems have dazzled her fellow poets but have puzzled lay readers. Bonne August has said, "Garrigue is a 'difficult' poet, difficult in the formal demands she makes on the reader; difficult, too, in the demands she makes on her poetry: to take her past easy formulations, comfortable insights, or glib prescriptions, to the truth of thing." Jane Mayhall noted her drive to the "dangerously deep levels of self."