"[Eric] Bennett’s argument is a persuasive reminder that certain seemingly timeless criteria of good writing are actually the product of historically bound political agendas, and it will be especially useful to anyone seeking to expand the repertoire of stylistic strategies taught within creative-writing programs." Timothy Aubry • New York Times

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"Even though I felt like I didn’t have time for anything, I found the time to do a lot of karaoke, which is a very good way to stay out too late and ignore your problems. I do karaoke so often that I barely even have a go-to song. Here is a selection (seriously! not exhaustive!) of the songs I sang at karaoke over the past couple of years, while I was writing many of the essays that ended up in The Word Pretty." Elisa Gabbert • largehearted boy

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"Constructed in the tradition of dos-à-dos or tête-bêche binding, the edition has two front covers: lo terciario and the tertiary. The Spanish and English texts are rotated 180° relative to one another, such that the bilingual reader, halfway in, would rotate the book upside down to read the collection in its entirety. Or—if you are an anglophone reader, like myself—you are made literally aware that you are reading only one half of the book." Amy Paeth • Jacket2

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"Like Emily Dickinson’s, these pinpoint-accurate, visionary structures coalesce into a remarkable body of work – from the early poems recounting travel in Pakistan and Tibet, to the more local concerns of The Queen of Sheba (1994) where you can almost hear Jamie hitting her stride: something mysterious happens in her work around this time, a quickening of vision, a greater confidence perhaps; whatever it is, it reaches a climax in Jizzen and the stunning nature poems of The Tree House (2004)." Caitriona O'Reilly The Irish Times

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"The price of [Ezra] Pound’s survival, as [Daniel] Swift sees it, was a public renunciation of his authority as a writer and thinker. Having spent decades setting himself up as an expert not only in literature but in politics, economics, history, anthropology, and Sinology, among other fields, Pound was now admitting that he lacked the mental competence to stand trial. The Cantos was meant to be 'a poem containing history' that synthesized all Pound knew and believed into an epic masterpiece that would help put civilization on the right track in the 20th century. Now it was used as an exhibit demonstrating its author’s incoherence." Evan Kindley • The Nation

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"[T]he poem has the busy, fragmented look of one of Ezra Pound’s cantos, but where Pound needed to stitch together textual quotations 'by hand,' as it were, in order to achieve the same effect, [Allen] Ginsberg lets the machine collect evidence for him." Evan Kindley • Poetry

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"Poetry is as intimate as it is non-remunerative, a tiny part of the small word of books where writers lay themselves bare and mine the darkest corners of their lives for art. To steal the words of another poet isn’t just theft, but violation." Kat Rosenfield • Vulture

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"By memorizing the spatial layout of a building and assigning images or ideas to its various rooms, one could 'walk' through the imaginary building and retrieve the ideas relegated to the separate parts." Aysegul Savas • Paris Review

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"His son William (Butler Yeats) diagnosed “infirmity of will” as the ailment that prevented him from finishing his pictures: “He even hates the sign of will in others…the qualities which I thought necessary to success in art or in life seemed to him ‘egotism’ or ‘selfishness’ or ‘brutality.’”" Clair Wills NYRB

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"As Moore and Bishop roamed New York together, visiting museums or the circus, Bishop absorbed her mentor’s faith in accuracy profoundly. She came to resist metaphor and what she referred to as “the terrible generalizing of emotion”, and stick to simile and “plain facts”." Lucy Ingrams Magma

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"[Miles] Champion’s poetry is much more varied than just the language-oriented writing. And often there is a gentle wit running through these poems which makes them warm and involving in a way that’s unusual in much of this kind of poetry." Ian Pople The Manchester Review

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"Is artistry the right word? At one level, I suppose it has to be, but artistry suggests to me a consciousness of what one is doing. But that isn’t, in my experience, how poems get written. Rather, I just write my poems–and sure, there’s revision, I might rearrange words to avoid redundant sound patterns, or revise unneeded language away." Carl Phillips At Length

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