"My first reading of Luke Hathaway’s The Affirmations happened on a train stirring eastward through Pennsylvania on a day that was spring by calendar but not in sight, the fields still sere, the sunlight thin. In the quiet car, the living hum of bodies and tasks carried on around me, each of us experiencing a communal kind of solitude, while I sat in the deep winter of the collection’s second poem. Hathaway writes, “Yesterday the river ice, till now page-blank, was annotated / by coyotes. I followed their new year letters down along the / west side of the island[.]”" Holly M. Wendt • Ploughshares

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"W. B. Yeats was surely wrong when he wrote that “[w]e make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” This suggests that poetry, in its essence, has no public dimension, that the realms of politics, of community, of shared experiences more generally, don’t belong in the genre, which is better suited to expressions of the inner spirit." Justin Quinn • LARB

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"To be sure, displacement figures in Mlinko’s work — her family is from Hungary and Belarus via Brazil; they left their home countries after World War II and arrived in the United States shortly before Mlinko’s birth — but there is something distinctly, appealingly midcentury about her witty brand of literary peregrination, both self-aware and out of place." Oona Holahan • LARB

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"It was with great shock and sadness that I learned of the passing last evening of Steven Heighton. We knew that he was ill, though we hadn’t for long. We were certain that he—and we—had more time." Dan Wells • Biblioasis

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"In “Künstlerroman,” Vuong describes being in a room of “crystal chandeliers, waiters with plates of caviar spoons, flutes of champagne” and being handed “a book, the artifact of his thinking.” He then signs it “a deliberately affected, illegible signature.” The whole poem is steeped in pitying melancholy, but it is hard to read and feel any other emotion than despair. If the poetry were better, perhaps some readers could forgive such self-indulgence. But when it comes amidst such half-hearted lines as “the man is surrounded by merry people in fine dress,” it is hard to make it to the end of the page." Francesca Peacock • Spectator World

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"For the Ukrainian-American poet, editor, and translator Boris Dralyuk, Hollywood is “a grand old dame reduced to dishabille, / her glory far too faded to restore.” Dralyuk sees the city from the perspective of immigrants and refugees, as the seat of exile and hope, connected by mythology and money to each of its surrounding communities. His individual poems may at first appear slight in their ambition, but they accumulate a vision and recover a history too few remember." David Mason • Los Angeles Review

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