"The figure of Ouroboros comes to mind with both the concerns and structure of this section, the snake of time circling back and repeating, swallowing itself. A tenuous answer is given to the questions of temporality with this circular pattern. O’Neill’s ruminations on the other plant the speaker on more solid ground. The last poem ends, in part, with a sense of timelessness..."

"The relationship to place draws forth the invocation that our bodies feel what the eyes lack. It is strange and suggests that what we see (including in this book) will require an undoing of our eyes..."

"Durbin’s text masterfully troubles these siren-song waters, engaging the allure and the artificiality of the celebrity women depicted. A quatrain of female personae, the chapbook has four sections, the first of which, 'The Hills,' opens to a color picture of Lauren Conrad playing Lauren Conrad on The Hills. It’s a still from a computer screen, a clip excerpted in what appears to be a YouTube video, and a small reflection from real life, sunlight pouring through vertical blinds, appears in the left-hand corner of the photo. Lauren is crying, a single tear drawing mascara down her cheek in a cinematic way that one can look at and say definitively, 'that moment was created for film.'..."

"One of the most heartfelt and humble admissions that could be applied throughout the collection, comes in 'Still Life with Lenny Bruce in Jail,' where because 'This whole generation’s strung out,' (meaning, both Bruce’s as well as our own), the speaker watches the late Bruce inject heroin in his arm because 'you don’t care, so I won’t too/As the cop down the hall watches me watch/You shoot up.' Such a line is important, not for the depiction of someone famous and controversial chasing the dragon, but because it illustrates that Long’s speaker is capable of being witnessed—just as we witness Bruce through his eyes, he is, and so are we, witnessed elsewhere. Just as with Long’s Kafka, we look at the subjects of Long’s still lives-in-motion, but we cannot see through him because he undercuts his speaker’s omniscience habitually, opting for the human, the tragically fucked up, and the carelessness-prone over the invisibly perfect..."

"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."