"It is one of the collection’s many virtues that it doesn’t allow us the redemptive enjoyment of knowing that this person escapes at all, even though the pacing and the narrative voice imply that he is speaking, at some level, from the other side of exile – the safer side, if not necessarily the happier side." Dai George on Nick Makoha The White Review

---

"What if, on the other hand, Tony Hoagland’s speaker were a clownishly reactionary bigot spewing racial slurs, someone clearly not the poet. How easy it would be to put that character where he belonged: not me. Nothing to do with me. No, this poem is about a much more prevalent, more insidious sort of racism—white, liberal, emotional, infrastructural—mostly hidden—racism." Daisy Fried Poetry

---

"In poetry—and elsewhere—epiphanies have gone out of style. Make no mistake, though, we read looking for the same catharsis, the same edifying sense of being connected to something beyond ourselves we’ve always wanted—and literature still offers that experience, however carefully disguised." Tom Andes • Sink

---

"Both walking through a city and reading a poem are ways to thoughtfully and pleasingly disrupt the flow of time and possibly to intensify or concentrate your experience. Both constitute occasions to ignore or even disrupt the prevailing fantasies—predicated on speed—of global capitalism: efficiency, profit maximization, and productivity. A poem is by design inefficient; it’s not a set of instructions or a memo or a text. A walk is almost never the fastest way to get somewhere. But both walks and poems can afford a more textured and deep experience of space and time." Kathleen Rooney • Poetry

---

"I was waiting for Baby, I Don’t Care with heightened senses. Can she top Poemland. Is she gonna do something completely different. How old is she these days. And so on. The answers to those questions turned out to be no; no; and forty-eight." Anthony Madrid • Rhino

---

"Like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or Denise Riley’s Say Something Back, this is a book that feels as if it redefines the ways in which the lyric is currently conceived." Paul Batchelor New Statesman

---

"But can I just say this Ilya, I saw you read at Calabash in Jamaica a few years ago and you had Valzhyna Mort read your incredible poems after you read them yourself because you weren’t sure your voice would travel to us. Then I saw you read in Newcastle this year and you had printed your poems so we could all follow you. You moved me to tears, partly because it reminded me of how we’ve had to put in extra work to develop our deaf poetics, it has to be alive for us in a physical space as well as on the page." Raymond Antrobus Poetry International

---

"What some enlightened people attempt, from the Vanguardia to the present day, is to achieve a state of poetry in which all arts reintegrate once more. That is to say, if from one perspective we’ re talking about evolution, from another perspective we have to talk about accumulation. Stated in paradoxical form, we can affirm that in poetry and in the arts containing poetry, there is progress, and there’s no progress." Mayra López, trans. Kristin Dykstra • Chicago Review (scroll down)

---

"During last February’s New York Fashion Week, the designer Tracy Reese had models strut to poetry readings on the catwalk. Even the insurance firm Nationwide is getting in on the trend; it recently released a series of commercials in which poets wax on about the miracle of a mortgage." Faith Hill and Karen Yuan The Atlantic

---

"is poems were best appreciated when read aloud, allowing all those internal rhymes and well-paced rhythms to be heard. In a hotel room in Prague, I read Dialann Bóthar to my companion from start to finish, insisting he appreciate the artistry of the sounds." Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh on Liam O Muirthile Irish Times

---

"But, for most of Western history, men cried incessantly, and mostly for themselves. In one of the first written accounts of a man crying, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is drunk, and a singer, Demodocus, is taking requests. Odysseus wants to hear the one about Odysseus—of his own adventures in the Trojan War, desperately wending his way home. Listening to someone sing of his embattled sorrows, he begins to cry. “Great Odysseus melted into tears,” Homer writes. Nothing made the man cry quite like himself. And when he finally returned home, years later, in disguise, his nurse recognized him by his weeping. His cry face was his truest self." Michael Lista • New Yorker

---

"I have seen few photographs of the poet Jack Spicer, and none as compelling as Jonathan’ s. Spicer stands on a huge log at the bottom of a towering log pile somewhere in Mendocino County, California, in 1954. I think of him snarling on a bar stool, keeping his crew in line at the Place or some other North Beach bar. Spicer is taller in this photograph than he is in my mind’ s eye, and he has a dour expression. Perhaps he feels as out of place as he looks. Every time I look at this photograph I come away with the odd sensation that I’ m missing something, that Spicer has eluded my gaze." William Corbett Chicago Review

---

"Because of this strong rootedness in narrative and in autobiography, Levine has often been unfashionable among critics and writers with more “experimental ” sensibilities. Yet his writing, as Hirsch describes it, is “a fundamentally human-centered poetry, ” and, much more than an easily epiphanic narrative poet, Levine is a careful witness to a wide range of human experience, as evidenced, among other places, in this collection’ s many poems about travel in Europe and South America." Christopher Kempf Chicago Review

---

"Rather than simply articulating the dynamic of intimate online communication through poems that are non-complex in form and aim, post-internet poetry has the opportunity to exploit the ambivalence of cuteness. If a poem itself is tender and cute, an intimate expression of commodified subjectivity, an inadequate vehicle for politics in a marginal artform, perhaps it should also be monstrous and dangerous, looming over the streets and straining at its tethers.Within digital platforms, we are typically situated as both consumers and producers, in control and yet completely powerless: for Facebook, its users provide content for each other, whilst having their attention sold to advertisers; for Uber, its ‘partner drivers’ are able to ‘make money on [their] terms,’ whilst being managed, controlled and potentially ‘deactivated’ via the app.67 Our position is always cute; perhaps this way we retain the capacity for revenge." Lucy Burns and Charles Whalley Partisan Hotel

---

"Rosselli resisted the appropriation of Plath’s work by feminists, although she, like Plath, deliberately confronted gender barriers. No doubt Rosselli agreed with her fellow poet Armanda Guiducci, who wrote in Italian Women Poets (2002) that “when people speak of ‘women’s poetry’ they mean a sub-standard poetry, one that is unstructured or weak, pathetic, or sentimental. This roses and papier-maché poetry is normally compared unfavorably to ‘virile’ poetry, which we characterize as passionate, powerful, abstract, etc.”" Lisa Mullenneaux Critical Flame

---

"Those who are able to make a living from art will always be in a small minority. The difference between either resisting ‘professionalisation’ or identifying as a ‘professional’ poet in a more fluid sense seems to be whether we experience this as an active or passive shift, as something either structurally imposed or conscientiously adopted. Whether the reflex is to bristle or brighten at the evolving language of these debates, a clearer focus on its practical effects will help us understand the new situation it creates. Alongside questions of pay, we might come to view poetry’s occupational turn as less a threat to creative integrity than a reflection of the need to widen its opportunities." JT Welsch The Poetry Review

---

" The light is not dying but resurging, and even when it does begin to fade we feel it will not be raged at but accepted as a part of the natural order of things, the precursor to another Ovidian metamorphosis. The collection is wonderfully varied. There is a poem to the poet’s daughter, one on Hurricane Ophelia and one on Being a Dog; there is even a lament on the Time of Trump. All testify to the unflagging spirit of one of the very finest of Irish poets, living or dead, “still singing, still going strong”. Against the Clock gives cause for national celebration." John Banville on Derek Mahon Irish Times

---

"As an outsider, when you enter a prison for the very first time, what immediately assaults you is the blah architecture: nothing ornamental, the floor, ceilings, and walls painted an awful institutional gray or green, the lighting too bright or too dark." Tom Sleigh Yale Review

---

"Justice for Pablo Neruda, and for his readers, would be to acknowledge his sins without losing sight of his accomplishment—meaning his voice." David Mason Hudson Review

---

"For indigenous people in this country the English language is a kind of trade language. We are over five hundred federally recognized nations. There are over 220 living indigenous languages. This whole hemisphere is Indian country, from North to South, rich in many cultures, in many languages. English, Spanish, and French allow us to move about and communicate more globally. But it is our tribal languages that allow us to know ourselves intimately." Joy Harjo • poets.org

---

"While many post-conceptual poets continue the appropriation and transformation of pre-written texts that is central to conceptual poetry, there seems to be an increased emphasis in their work on performativity, the tangible impact of social media, and an eclecticism of styles ranging from employing appropriated texts to writing more freely." Hazel Smith Cordite

---

"Although there have been many calls for decolonization in literary studies, the issue remains: how does poetry include rather than exclude myriad traditions and, therefore, myriad voices? how does poetry build upon its foundations a new, decolonized canon?" Emilia Phillips • Ploughshares

---