"Kay Ryan rejects the pained, stylized self-consciousness that characterizes so much contemporary poetry." Meghan O'Rourke • Slate

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"I'm really just a nice, middle-class Jewish boy from New Jersey." August Kleinzahler talks to John M. Glionna • Los Angeles Times

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"James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking." Rebecca Porte • Contemporary Poetry Review

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"Exactly why we take personal poems so, well, personally remains a mystery and a muddle." David Orr • The New York Times

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"The pleasure of unhappiness is particularly Portuguese." Michael Kimmelman on Pessoa • The New York Times

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"This is the Kleinzahler I prefer — not the spoiler, bragging about his sexploits or badmouthing his acquaintances, nor the expert, showing off his technical vocabulary, but the poet of simple, stark recognition." Marjorie Perloff • TLS

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"The consolations of poetry, as 'Posthumous Keats' reminds us, last only as long as the poem lasts." Adam Kirsch • The New Yorker

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"Most contemporary American political poems have more relevance to the politics of the poetry world than to the politics of America." David Orr • Poetry

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