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This book is entirely beautiful.
—Donald Revell
I feel a securing confidence, as if she had given me her hand.
—Robert Creeley
This is simply a gorgeous book.
—Cole Swensen
Aphoristic, enigmatic, and startling.
—C.D. Wright
I love Kathleen Fraser's extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too.
—Robert Creeley
Something extremely important is going on, something wonderful.
—Lyn Hejinian
These new, short, explosive poems of Stefanie
Marlis raise a subtle and rich reminder that all of what we write
comes down to one word, the right word, the word that in a flash
exposes a daring recognition of ourselves in the world. She writes
an etymology of our sexual and physical lives, our unknown lives,
our daily lives.
—Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes
Dazzling poems,
wholly taken in by where
the words are going.
—Adam Phillips
Reading Denise Newman is like imbibing a divine
elixir, making one realize how thirsty one has been all this time.
Perhaps even dead. Her work is intimate, erotic, pantheistic, metaphysical,
then sprinkled with the odd grace and beauty of American colloquialisms.
Full of a kind of delightful unrest where "sky tosses disposition
about," and "earth is a gentle panting thing to eat," one wants
to live forever in her human forest, asking with her, "Couldn't
we go on climbing into infinity like lambs quaintly passing time?"
—Gillian Conoley
A terrific poet, on any terms.
—Ron Silliman
Cole Swensen's brilliant, witty riff on the
history and meaning of opera as art form represents and refigures
high passion and baroque exultation in the most minimal, condensed,
and quiet of vocabularies and phrasal units. Oh is opera cool-the
aria transformed into delicate echo—
thus witless
this edgeless—
and it is precisely this restraint-this subtle aural and verbal
spin on opera as extravagant art-that allows the reader to revel
in the difference-as well as the continuity—of our own poetic
moment.
—Marjorie Perloff
Swift and rich, an entire world passes here in vivid glimpses.
—Cole Swensen
Narration, physically close as a noose. Clarified
American speech slashed by Vietnamese shadow vernacular. Water supply,
sparse and diminishing. Teeth marks: word hunger: eating, bitter
and fabulous. Truong Tran's first book is a voluptuary of the difficult
real. To be entered, and entered. Gratefully.
—Kathleen Fraser
Everywhere in The Pleasures of C, ranges of
relation—whether those of form or of content-are explored.
"An old story/mistranslated/one more time" leads the reader through
and to Mexican roads, Algerian voices, a mother at once older and
younger than her son, a "small republic" of passions and perceptions
dragged from its foundations into the sea. Yet to be in this sea
is not to be at sea. Though the poet attests, "I was lost/and have
been/lost/ever since," these poems are firmly grounded in a generosity
of impulse and meaning which orient the reader to the poetic journey
undertaken. At the end of that wandering, Edward Smallfield shows
us the habitation of the poem: for all the foreignness it can encompass,
the reader comes upon this site as its door is ajar. Entering, one
feels uncannily at home.
—Elizabeth Robinson
A lovely explication of 'dharma'—things as they are, and how precious they are.
—Anne Waldman
This is a book that never swerves from its purposes
and never allows the reader to. These poems are at the harsh center
of things—in the urban sprawl, in the crucible of action, on
the scene of the crime. The marvel is that the poet never forgets
the obligations and enchantments of language. These are strong,
memorable and also compelling poems.
—Eavan Boland
One of our most intellectually ambitious poets.
—Ron Silliman
Truong's masterwork crashes through.
—Juan Filipe Herrera
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