"The scatter-effect of such a compositional strategy produces a book that is unintelligible in the way that the most private and pleasurable experiences exist in memory outside of both language and time. The private meaning made via the text is transformational as an act of the reader’s powers of imagination under the influence of Legault’s “proper structure,” where “what / went in went out but multiplied” (“Madeleine as Crusoe”). Like shining a flashlight through cut glass, The Madeleine Poems make their own pattern and light as the reader moves through them, the beam of the gaze throwing color against the wall."

"For Cobb, like Susan Howe and Robert Duncan, the truth of what a fact is lies in the term’s historical derivation, and that truth, contrary to popular belief, shows fact to be a form of social production, a gathering rather than a dividing of cultural values and observations. To think of fact in this way, socially constructed and process oriented, compels us then to re-imagine the parameters of Perloff’s question. One reason for writing something that doesn’t resemble “poetry” and then passing it off as such, could be to historicize and denaturalize the very notion of genres. Cobb confirms art and fact to be ineluctably commensurable with one another, conceiving both to be in essential correspondence with the trace."

"For the coolness of these paintings is not a matter of technique or cognition but a mapping of the erosion of feeling—its sediments and strata. The poignancy of these images, entirely at odds with their scale and abstraction, evokes a world that is captive yet resistant to the historical world: a world that summons in the viewer something like the mysterious affect and the irretrievable motives of one under enchantment, one controlled from afar."

"The poetry is shaped by its excitement. It rips into new visions with almost every sentence, while simultaneously jostling the reader around with its sharp line breaks. Each poem forces the reader to jump with it, line to line to line, and to therefore also acknowledge its physical attributes on the page—here, the eyeball falls through the poem until it smacks into 'shelves.' Christle’s work is anything but flat, measured, and predictable. Later in the above poem, Christle plays 'I spy' with the reader ('I spy, with my little eye, / the German city of Hamburg'), goes to Zanzibar, and then becomes a marauder."

"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.