"These postcard meditations call into question what America means by 'we,' and why many feel that the presence of immigrants means there isn’t enough barbed wire to keep them ('us') out."

"Poets cannot really 'leave things unspoken,' but they can learn what will suffice. Like Morandi, Kimmelman lays out the terms of his work with a deliberate bareness, trusting to a power of suggestion (not produced by symbolism, but more simply, by syntax measured against syllable count) that will sustain and complete the poem. The phrase 'a made world' takes us back to William Bronk, perhaps the greatest of Kimmelman’s immediate precursors. For Bronk, as for Morandi, and as for Kimmelman, the work of art is always 'a made world,' a binding of desire and a stubborn, necessary turning of the artist’s materials back upon themselves to achieve an otherwise impossible sufficiency. It is the artist’s way of testing reality, of seeing what is and what is to come."

"It is tempting to expound on Simko’s role as a political tragedy, an émigré experience of being irrevocably lost between two identities and burdened with a past that he had little influence over. As a lyric poet, he might make use of these conditions, but to make them into a fundamental of his poetry would be out of proportion and mythologizing. After all, the singleness suffered is not exclusive to the fronts of bygone wars and their aftermath. We take Simko’s lyric mode to be an answer to his condition, not a symptom of it."

"Boris lives in a world that mirrors reality. It is not real, you see, because of the words, which Yankelevich’s Author realizes might be the most frightening aspect of his position as creator living through his creation. This philosophical trajectory carries the book and provides the more important reason that it should be praised: it unabashedly recognizes the artifice of art but refuses to succumb to the fear of its lack of utility."

By the time we’re through to the end of the stanza, we’re not just on a physical journey together — we’ve entered into a kind of community over time, bound to the distant past and the future. As we read on, it becomes clear that we are bound in this community less by the experience of a shared journey than by the experience of common texts or stories.