"The level of craft at work in each of the poems in “Don’t Call Us Dead” is exceptional. These are poems about black men and their imperiled, impassioned bodies, what it means to live with HIV, and so much more. There is pain here but there is so much joy, so much fierce resistance to anything that dares to temper the stories being told here."

"I bought this in 1985 and have read it constantly since. It is always near me. Wallace’s poems often reflect on the act of creating, and he evokes exquisite mental images that are thrilling. One of my favorite poems is “The Snow Man.” “For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”"

"A self-proclaimed post-modern confessionalist poet, his poems gather and distribute so much energy it's like he's a boxer, or a wrestler rather than a writer."