Contemporary Poetry: Must Reads
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"Christine Kitano writes with clarity and honesty about displacement, deracination, and cultural identity. Her poems in this book convey the dignity of the immigrant in America, the 'sky country' of the title. In one of the most moving of them, ‘A Story with No Moral,’ we can see that indeed there is moral depth to all that she writes. She expresses that depth when she affirms, in 'Autobiography of the Poet at Sixteen,' 'we are built for life, / for love, which means / we are built for pain.' These poems are testimonies of survival and we need their witness as much as ever." ―Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry
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"Combing cultural and personal history, Kitano is generous in revealing her family lore and the emotional politics of settlement and displacement. Meant to firmly focus and guide the reader, her poems point to the tragedies and triumphs of living in a world that creates us and destroys us, sometimes all in one day.” –Booklist
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Published 2017
"Fairchild's poetry explores the empty landscapes of the region of his birth, and the lives of its working-class residents, including his own family and friends. Frequently described as a poet of the 'sacred,' Fairchild’s work has gained renown for its union of high and low culture and art, as well as its interest in evoking beauty in quotidian memories and events...[winner] of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the California Book Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry" -Poetry Foundation
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"In one piece after another, Fairchild profiles people engaged in moments of private pain or pleasure, intimate triumphs or tragedies, and coping with grief or personal disappointments in their homes, on the farmlands, at the machine shops, or among the oil rigs. In his poems, Fairchild revisits the locations and vocations that influenced his formative years, and through intricately detailed pictures painted by his memory, he profiles and preserves the people who helped shape his understanding of the world around him, as well as his acute awareness of self, the person he was and the person he would become...Fairchild may have found a life for himself in the books he read when he was younger, still dreaming of driving away to a new beginning; however, in Local Knowledge he now seems driven to the task of bringing to life those he knew so well back then." -Edward Byrne, Valparaiso Poetry Review
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Published 2005
"Why call any of it back? Tarfia Faizullah asks in her gorgeous and powerful debut collection, Seam. In poems made more harrowing for what's not said--the poet's elegant and wise restraint--we confront the past and its aftermath in the lives of women interrupted by violence and brutality and loss. It wasn't enough light to see clearly by, she tells us, but I still turned my face toward it. Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision and Seam is a beautiful and necessary book." --Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate
"Seam reaffirms that imagination is the backbone of memory, the muscular fiber that enables us to re-grasp our humanity. With patience and immaculate lyric precision, and with sublime attention to language and the courage to interrogate her privilege and curiosity, Faizullah twines a seam where the wounds are re-membered, fingers quivering, spooling, and unspooling what we know of healing. This is a powerful debut, a reminder that some things should perhaps never be forgiven, a poignant record set against forgetfulness." --Khaled Mattawa
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Published 2014
"Using umbilicus as guide rail, the speaker of Nickole Brown's Sister an unflinching and deeply intelligent first book undertakes a hair-lifting expedition back to her childhood so as to return herself to the arms of a younger sister both long neglected and longed for. Proving that narrative and lyric are never mutually exclusive, Brown pulls the reader down the rain-swollen rush of river where her past gurgles with the sound of diesel, to reveal the pedophile a man who simply // cannot stop. These poems, always stunning in their clairvoyance, advise us to take such experience and simply / bury it, but bury it / alive. I cannot imagine a world in which one could read this book and not experience the confluence of dismay and wonder." --Cate Marvin, Ploughshares
"The poems that comprise this haunted narrative are speckled with waterbeds, frosted hair, home pregnancy tests, disco, cigarettes, and black-light posters. The story is of a childhood mired in the 1970s. It is a dark, almost unforgivable world, yet in writing these grim and vivid poems, Nickole Brown has dredged up that all too rare human gift mercy." --Maurice Manning
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Published 2007
“Wise blood throbs in the veins of these poems, and wild song lilts through each line. From Carolina woods to Texas canyons, from motherhood to slaughter, Noel Crook’s Salt Moon startles with its reach and gratifies with its depth. Don’t miss this exquisite book.”—Barbara Ras, author of The Last Skin
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“I feel carried away by these rapturously perfect poems. Hold any line or stanza in your mind—it bears the exact weight, energy, and detail needed to create the scenes and worlds inhabiting this most potent, tender collection.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer
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“Morally complex, syntactically dexterous, these brave poems simultaneously consider the past and the future in images that both lacerate and reconcile. Crook merges worlds—white sun, white moon—in poems whose yearning leads us back and forth from stars to nearer fires.”—Dorianne Laux, author of Facts about the Moon
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Published 2015
"Past Lives, Future Bodies is a collection of poems that simmers and soars. Its tightly crafted stanzas propel each piece at a frantic pace that makes it almost impossible not to read in a single sitting, yet the thematic depth of Chang’s work demands that readers return to these poems again and again. On successive readings, I was stunned by the book’s exploration of queerness, gender nonconformity, and Confucian daughterhood—with poems like “History of Sexuality”—and the poems’ clever indictment of racist micro- and macroaggressions, with lines like “the doctor says / all medicine is white / lies & lying,” or “apples are native / to asia… meaning paradise / was eve’s / colony / of fruit.” This chapbook is a painstakingly wrought and wildly brilliant debut, and is sure to leave any reader (myself included) waiting impatiently for another book from Kristin Chang." --Torrin A. Greathouse, The Rumpus
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"Kristin Chang emerges as an urgent, sumptuous voice, a poet of numerous gifts and intellectual dexterity who we’ll be reading for years to come. Chang’s wide-ranging concerns—familial love and violence, queerness, race, the first-generation immigrant experience, and the paradox of masculinity—strain at the edges of the page, this slim collection containing a fully imagined, immersive world. The constant, however, is the pleasure of Chang’s verse, which has a protean energy—a shifting, silvery beauty that allows her to carry darkness lightly, and as it moves through her poems, transform it into something unexpected and entirely new." -- Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, Adroit Journal
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Published 2018
"Michael Meyerhofer's poems embody the voice of a poet and person always reaching for and striving after those mythic and elusive human qualities beauty, wonder, knowledge, desire. But even when this poet's narratives describe a world where the quest for those qualities is thwarted, his work is always readable, relatable, and recognizable. There's humor here too not the humor of the easy laugh and quick joke, but a profound humor born of wisdom and experience. This book is the start of a career that will mean much to those readers of poetry in search of a writer who will never falter in telling them the hard yet gorgeous truths of life." - Allison Joseph, author of Worldly Pleasures
"Meyerhofer has the inner resources and the craft to address worlds imagined and ideal, but he insists on writing chiefly of this one, and he does it fearlessly, masking neither warmth nor anger. He accomplishes in his first book what many never approach, a personal candor, a rare balance of humor and seriousness. He reminds me of a young James Wright. He reveals the heart as do few other poets who have suffered an education." - Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues
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Published 2007
"Lesley Brower's poems create direct paths to complicated truths, paths that begin and end in the natural world. She celebrates and honors every river and tree, kestrel and crow, firefly and mosquito. She recognizes the past, present, and future of every living thing, including us. In the clearest language, her poems acknowledge that we all share a "single, feathered heartbeat." --Don Boes
"Seeing is a creative act; seeing, and then saying what is seen in a clear, lyrical voice is poetry. Lesley Brower sees not only the fine details of rural Kentucky life, but looks for what they may suggest about larger truths, perhaps, even, "the blaze of God through the tatter of corn leaves." SALT LICK PRAYER is a fine beginning for a poet." --Joe Survant
"These poems are a fist that punched me in the gut, but they're also a long-fingered hand that brought me a glass of water and an ibuprofen. [...] Lesley Brower's poems "fluster my grip / on this earth, set me skyward / in a sun-flushed whirl." --Tom C. Hunley
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Published 2017
"Smith, most recently a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, has written a debut collection of poetry deeply in the debt of Robert Frost, and this is welcome. Smith’s title declares his allegiance to the rural, and a good number of the poems dwell on his upbringing on a dairy farm in a small Illinois town. Unlike many contemporary poets, Smith looks hard at things and is reserved—he is not quick to declare or memorialize his feelings. He also respects the craft, as in this exact yet mysterious passage from “Fort Da”: “I would wake to the sound / of tires on gravel like the sound / of a man walking with bags / of ice tied to his feet.” Smith intends the perfect rhyme of sound and sound, and this intention is already more than many poets attempt these days. Not all the poems succeed, but this is nonetheless a fine first collection. Smith has found his own ground, and he is content to work it in his own way." --Michael Autrey
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"Smith's close familiarity with the everyday tragedies of our human existence is recorded in diction that is readily accessible to the average reader, but which has a depth that is capable of resounding through the hearts and souls of his audience, facilitating their response, even if they come from an essentially nonpoetic background. . . . Smith's work is well worth investing in, so do consider acquiring yourself a copy--he is clearly a modern-day poet who deserves your attention."---Lois Henderson, Bookpleasures.com
"Almanac by Austin Smith is a magical collection of lyrical poems which mark, and mourn, the passing of a way of life, of the small family farmer, in the rural Midwest. . . . It's a stunning first collection, chosen by Paul Muldoon for the reinvigorated Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets."---Keith Richmond, Tribune
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Published 2013
"Reaper knocked me flat with its utter breathlessness. . . . McDonough paints a stark picture of a soulless tomorrow ruled by the technologies of convenience―a tomorrow we just might stop if we could."―Patricia Smith
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"These poems are wayyy calibrated for a kind of tensile language that doesn't sacrifice Jill McDonough's enviable ability to talk pragmatically into the heart of the matter inside poems, which is itself a feat. Reaper has all McDonough's best strengths—a perfect fusion of the early work's commitment to form and concept and project, plus the naughty yet sophisticated candor of Where You Live. . . it's a really good fucking book." —Kirsten Andersen
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Published 2017
"Cooley brings an impressive range of literary forms, voices, and conceptual lenses to bear on lingering questions about language and intimacy in her accomplished seventh collection. The seemingly unnatural pauses created by Cooley’s enjambment suggest the speaker’s hesitation as her modern voice is made to fit the confines of literary tradition in much the same way that a complex and multifarious life is situated within what is here portrayed as the thoroughly unmodern framework of marriage. Cooley thus remains ever vigilant in dangerous terrain, however tamed: “We stand together in the glass garden made of sand and fire.” Throughout, Cooley fearlessly weaves together threads on inadequacy, the inability of the individual to achieve a kind of selfless intimacy, and the shortcomings of the iconic, long-standing institutions so often perceived as emblematic of closeness, self-sacrifice, and commitment." --Publishers Weekly
"Ultimately, these poems are reminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee," although Browning's warmth is replaced by a cool and often flippant tone. Yet even though the collection sometimes puts readers at arm's length. Given the subject, it's commendable that Cooley maintains her distance. Her coolness keeps the collection from becoming maudlin." —C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD
Library Journal
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Published 2018
“To experience [Phillip B. William’s] poetry is to encounter a lucid, unmitigated humanity, a voice for whom language is inadequate, yet necessarily grasped, shaped, and consumed. His devout and excruciating attention to the line and its indispensable music fuses his implacable understanding of words with their own shadows.” ―Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Boston Review
“This gorgeous debut is a ‘debut’ in chronology only, a rare poetic event that transcends our expectations. Williams’s poems embody balance: uncompromising and magnetic, surprising and intuitive. Need is everywhere―in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave.” ―Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke
“Not just more of the artfully skill-less, conceptual talk of a poem, this is what you’ve been waiting for: some poetry. Not just skill as possession, as a commodity, but skill to accomplish the expressive event, a deeply felt poetic argument. For example Williams’ line is no arbitrary unit of type, but an effective musically syntactic accomplishment of line. Poetry!” ―Ed Roberson
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Published 2016
“With this single breathtaking debut, Catherine Pond has earned her place among the most powerful, visionary, and inventive poets of her generation. Her poetry, with its visceral lyric grace and nuanced modulations, recalls the work of a young Louise Glück in its naked disquiet, its sense of imagistic reflection, and its arresting beauty. Often gestural, elliptical, and devastating, Pond’s poems assemble into luminous constellations of echoing loss. Gripping Fieldglass in your hands, it is impossible ever to look away.”—David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: Selected and New Poems
“The poems in Fieldglass are astonishing in their honesty, and I devoured their fearlessness greedily. Pond charts fantasy, family, and the painful trust and powerful abandonments that teach us what love is. Concise, lyrical, and rife with compelling turns, this book brings the world close and helps you see it, helps you know it, helps you bear its truths.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
“What is the syntax of longing? The speaker of Pond’s debut collection conjures earthquakes, partial moons, and the mild lakes of her childhood. We witness the phantasmic powers of Pond’s imagination, a poet who spots horse teeth baring in the mist and feels the centrifugal pull of a sinister darkness. Amidst these dimensions of desire and apparition, Pond reveals the geography of a theatrical unconscious. Elegant and unsettling, the poems remake the reader and offer us an emotional complexity that we desperately need.”—Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys
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Published 2021
"Grim Honey explores the messiness of the human body and a constellation of losses. Barksdale writes with great verve and energy about every subject from family to travel to death. There's an urgency to these poems, a persistence in all things, whether it's the writing itself or the cataloguing of the world's beauties and tragedies. She knows how to turn a curse into a benediction, an old kitchen into the site of new memories, each pain into the story of a deeply lived life." -Traci Brimhall, author of Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod and Rookery
"In the staggering "Hand-Painted", Jessica Barksdale tells us "[h]e would start one project /and move to the next, / never imagining / he'd die before / completing any." Everything exists as it is, until alchemy happens-a potent and blunt mythic or natural world is invoked. In "Three Sisters", we watch a personal mythology unfold, "the Easter queens, daughters / to our father, rain in the distance. // Time dripped itself loose, and we were still three / but now at war." In this quietly direct way, new truths are imparted. The generosity of these lessons on decisiveness and focus through the shifting of grief-the many dimensions of the depths of knowing and loving-are meted with great care. This model of growth offers the reader wisdom for how to open and move with a consistently transforming world." -Kari Flickinger, author of The Gull and the Bell Tower
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Published 2021
"The poems of Kelly Cressio-Moeller’s Shade of Blue Trees offer up an intimate surrealism, earth-born, deeply shaded, and tinted the deep blue of solitude, memory, and myth, turning 'yearning’s blue fire/into a dreamscape fugue.' Nowhere is Cressio-Moeller’s virtuosity more apparent than in the sequence of 'panels.' These pieces function as lyric poems, language-paintings, fairy tales, and compressed novels, somehow removed from time, with a lushness that reminds me of Flaubert—without the meanness. For instance: 'A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry’s/skull against the cheekbone of dusk,' and 'Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry—she orders/nests for her hair to keep skylarking near, wears the/clouds on her finger to be swallowed in vapor.' There are poems that walk the territory of the actual, from mother-loss, which winters the tips of the speaker’s hair, to embodiment: 'without my cervix I am no less queen/open me, see there’s nothing left to give.' Indeed this collection is evidence of a queendom that has been cultivated via solitude, loss, and time. 'For years,' she writes, 'her poemwork involved dipping arrows/into tinctures of monkshood. Beneath her shawl of/suffering, she yearned only for two gifts: to be seen, to be understood.' With the unveiling of Shade of Blue Trees, those gifts have been delivered." --Diane Seuss
"In Shade of Blue Trees, her astonishing debut collection, Kelly Cressio-Moeller weaves an intricate tapestry of imagery from the ferocity of grief, and the litany of disappearances we all inevitably bear, knowing every single moment something or someone is leaving. So much to praise in these resonant poems formed from the fissured bedrock of longing and sorrow: I wanted to drink a cup of winter . . . soft blades of mourning, with wry flashes of humor, this world is running out of virgins. There is nothing extraneous here, there is passion and wisdom, You taught me how not to live: all those years you were not dead but might as well have been. Each poem a hidden grotto to be re-visited, a quiet haunting in which we may take refuge." --Amber Coverdale Sumrall
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Published 2019
“The titular poem in John James’s debut collection refers not only to the luminous hour of infant nurture, although that is its occasion, but to the violent loss of his father, an event distant enough that ‘snowmelt smoothes the stone cuts of his name.’ James’s searing attention is upon the fleeting, the untethered, upon fecundity and decay, the cosmic and the molecular. These are also the poems of a young father’s daily life in the wane of empire, who wishes ‘to remember things purely, to see them / As they are,’ and who recognizes in what he sees our peril. ‘The end,’ he writes, ‘we’re moving toward it.’ James is, then, a poet of our precarious moment, and The Milk Hours is his gift to us.”―Carolyn Forché
“I can’t remember a collection of poems with a greater variety of trees in it than The Milk Hours, or one that has left me so conscious of the centrality of the tree to human history, or for that matter, to humanness itself―from the microscopic branches of our nerve endings to the vast tentacular dust lanes of the galaxy we live in. Impeccably constructed, profoundly felt, and every bit as gorgeous as it is full of powerful observation (a candlewick’s ‘braided cotton converting to ember,’ dead stars that throw ‘cold light through the black matter / of millennia’), The Milk Hours is a startlingly mature, exhilarating debut, and one whose urgent evocation of the past and confident reaching for what lies ahead ensure it a prominent place in our present.”―Timothy Donnelly
“The poetry of the earth is intensely alive in the poems of John James. In this luminous first book, there are poems of a son and a young father. Many of the best inhabit a tormented Kentucky landscape where there is a field with horses, a house and a barn, a flooding river, a cemetery where a parent lies, and bees or flies hovering. Out of the sorrowful fragments of personal history, John James has a created a book of unusual intelligence and beauty.”―Henri Cole
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Published 2019
“Extending Kwame Dawes’s already wide-ranging and prolific body of work, City of Bones is a testament to a complicated past that replays itself in the daily lives of so many Americans today. In the shadow of the Thirteenth Amendment Dawes remixes the works of August Wilson and brings lucidity to our present moment. Unafraid to trouble the waters and make clear why American race relations exist as they currently do, City of Bones sets the record straight and leaves no doubt that the past is ever present and we have not yet overcome. City of Bones should leave no question in the minds of any contemporary reader that Kwame Dawes is one of the most significant poets working today. This is poetry’s ‘Redemption Song.’” —Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite
“Why read Kwame Dawes? Because he knows how to ‘listen for the calm voice of God.’ Because he will show you how to grieve and not be torn open. Because his poem “The Things You Forget in Jail” shares with us empathy so unlike that of most North American poets at work today. Go back to him because Dawes is in love with ‘music of mint, ginger root, garlic, sweet / onion” of our language, its tormented ‘promise of good earth.’ Why read him? Because words ‘when spoken will soften / your chest.’ Why read Kwame Dawes? Because you cannot stop. Because Dawes is the poet to read when ‘all talking / is over’ and you sit alone in this room.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa
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Published 2017
“The impeccable crafting, formal mastery, and literary intelligence of View from True North all function as a brave counterbalance to the harrowing material at its core. What shores up the valor of this book’s acute witnessing gaze is its language—lush, lustrous, hammered into archetype: ‘Jags of heat-whelmed ice too sultry / not to thieve through the specular reflection / spiral into a raid of light’—its language as quantum physics, zeroing in on tragedy at the atomic level, at the semiotic level, the tyrant’s ashes ‘a collage of signs enticing / the next great signifier.’ Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
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“Sara Henning’s poems search through the past and present, never turning an eye from the pain of loss: a grandfather’s death and a father’s suicide. Both family portrait and mirror, each poem is rendered with lyrical precision and quiet reverie as they present a scarred life, the wounds healing but not yet closed. The speaker here claims to be the ‘heiress of disaster,’ and though much of her inheritance is loss, she shapes it, poem by poem, into strength.”—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men
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Published 2018
"Say prairie," the speaker instructs and thus the persuasive music of these poems calls us "into the darkness or the future." Whether evoking the very American landscape of Midwestern farms or tracing a more interior journey, Sandy Longhorn writes not only of solitude and longing but also of the power of language and its mysterious twin, quiet attention, to brighten the way. Here is the accuracy of faith. Here, a series of "momentary constellations" flickering. Here, poems "both diary and document/ held open and up to the light." -- Mary Ann Samyn
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Sandy Longhorn writes beautifully and convincingly of the Great Plains and of her native Iowa. Her vision of that landscape's open skies and flatland and distance seems richer and more nuanced than any I have seen before. She sings of its unsung inhabitants in musical, authentic, and moving lines. A necessary and great first book. -- Davis McCombs
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This is a beautiful yet modest and unassuming book, one that claims less than it accomplishes, transfiguring personal narrative and landscape into things rich and strange, yet always still themselves: in it, "The air is heavy with the desire to claw beneath/the surfaces of things." This work gives voice to and raises its voice out of "the voice-swallowing plains," and the harsh midwestern prairies that yield their harvest only to the strictest effort are both subject matter and formal analogy for these paradoxically lush and austere poems. "I mean to be accurate/and true," Longhorn writes. If accuracy is faithfulness to fact, and truth is the halo that illuminates and transforms fact, this book is indeed both. -- Contest judge Reginald Shepherd
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Published 2005
“In Sawgrass Sky, Andrew Hemmert reveals a Florida that's left out of the guidebooks, a place where mountains rise from refuse-heaps, black bears prowl the suburbs, and the past ‘is like an orange grove / abandoned behind broken barbed wire.’ Hemmert probes that past in poems dizzy with insights, always reaching for, and finding, the most surprising yet precise images. Though set in the woods and waters of a particular childhood, this thrilling debut is a larger reckoning with the homes we leave and those we make in the world.”
—Chelsea Rathburn, author of Still Life with Mother and Knife
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“From ‘the state with the prettiest name,' as Elizabeth Bishop describes Florida, comes Andrew Hemmert’s dazzling debut Sawgrass Sky. His poems recount ‘a disappearing landscape of sawgrass and smoke,’ where the wilderness of panthers and abandoned orange groves contends with the suburbs of Hemmert’s youth. Despite development’s encroachment, Hemmert establishes himself as a poet of the tropics, rendering lush, otherworldly visions of the natural world. In one gorgeous poem after another, the poet records how velvet night ‘slides in like a deadbolt’ and starlings flush from sugarcane. He preserves the music of ‘reeds rasping against the wind’s tongue’ and the ‘octopus shadows’ cast by live oaks. These incantatory poems land like a revelation. Hemmert also dares to observe his world in vulnerable detail. Heir apparent to James Kimbrell’s Christ-haunted Florida poems, Sawgrass Sky explores an evangelical boyhood in which dads are baptized in backyard swimming pools and sons must become seekers in their own time. Instead of disbelief, Hemmert finds his own paradise, problematic though it is, in the margins of our modern world. This is a young poet’s song against forgetting places and people that will not come again, his ‘hymn people are forgetting how to sing.’ Blessedly, Andrew Hemmert wrote it all down.”
— Jennifer Key, author of The Old Dominion
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Published 2021
"Patricia Clark's poems explore not only refuge but also wonder and appreciation, as well as astonishment. A number of the 56 poems collected here show her grappling with loss, especially the loss of her mother, though she isn't one to indulge in misery. Instead, she goes walking. It is the harp tree in "The Poplar Adrift" that Clark imagines giving voice to sorrow, thus sparing those who stroll by--"all the grief that passes" becoming, in the tree's very fibers, sound on the air, a wind through branches and leaves. Clark also finds opportunities for learning, for meditation, and for contemplation. Octavio Paz has written, "Nature speaks as though it were a lover." In many of the poems collected here, Clark listens to nature speaking and revels in this lover, aiming to capture some of the qualities of Michigan's trees, birds, and landscapes in lyric poems. It is Clark's particular gift to give us "tasted" as she draws her readers into the world, inhabiting the worlds of nature, head, and heart" --MSU Press
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Published 2009
"These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place 'where the Ferris Wheel / was the tallest thing in the valley,' where a boy would learn 'to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck / with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.' . . . In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties or because of them there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway 'like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.' . . . The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images. . . . In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it.” --Martin Espada
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Published 2010
"[Vuong] takes from Pound the ability to eternalize a moment." --POETRY
"Even as Vuong leads you through every pleasure a body deserves and all the ensuing grief, these poems restore you with hope, that godforsaken thing--alive, singing along to the radio, suddenly sufficient."--Traci Brimhall
"What this poet sees on the street, in a blizzard, or even while studying an apple reminds me of those dreams we have in common: dreams in which we are falling but never touch the ground, dreams in which we are naked in the presence of men suited for our ruin."--Jericho Brown
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"Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition....His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion."--The New Yorker
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Published 2016
"Is it risk when the writing feels like the only way to stay alive? Do we say 'staying alive' or 'getting over' when wit swims and turns and leaps ahead like a dolphin friend wearing a cute beanie who doesn't care if you're keeping up? Jos Charles announces early in this collection that their 'american / corpse has been such / a disappointment.' These poems know well enough that not everyone would demur so over the dead American. Still, they tender their 'fisty filth' in the 'fiscal light' to anyone's appetite. And though their wit and intellect go off ahead, these poems abide in the persistent actual, goading us to grow the shapes we need, whispering with what I have to call a social magic, 'Even carrots do it.'" —Farid Matuk
"Sutures sewn and ripped and sewn again, these are the poems you and I know we have been awaiting, the poet Jos whose anvil gets hammered inside us all the way. You are going to smell everything stronger no matter what you smell, you have entered this book because you do not want the world to ever be the same. You have always wanted poems that make better questions for our living, and it is in your hands now."—CAConrad
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Published 2016