This collection "is worldly in the best sense: drawing on the author's extensive time in Poland, the poems meditate on history and cross-cultural perspectives.
Remarkable and relentless, Where No One Spoke the Language achieves a voice of exile deeper than any I've heard from an American poet since The Waste Land.
[11] This collection is praised by the Sarmatian Review which states, "Bourne strikes a careful middle ground between the rewrite and negative capability.
"[12] Indeed, Bourne was in Poland during the Summer of 1980 and the rise of Solidarity—the shipyard strikes that soon took over the entire country and resulted in the Workers Accord being signed between Solidarity and the Polish government creating the first independent trade unions in the Eastern Bloc.
In The Polish Review, of On the Crossroads of Asia and Europe, it is commented that "Many of the poems read as English originals and have little of the awkwardness seen in some translated verse.