"At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them. Scarcely would I enter their world before I’d be transported to a myriad of other worlds."

"Wildness and control are recurring themes in Phillips’s brilliant poems, and they play out too in his winding, meticulous, everywhere self-interrogating syntax. He is our metaphysical poet, using the desiring, sexual body to ask poetry’s eternal questions in distinctively contemporary ways"

"In my personal canon, Frank Bidart is the gold standard, the most important living American writer. His discomfiting poems delve into extremes of emotion that would defeat almost any other writer. Fearless, brilliant, they remind me what the stakes of art should be."

"If I were allowed two books, I would pair this one with The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. I could spend a whole fall and winter just going back and forth between Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and Strand's "Dark Harbor.""

"I read a few pages from this Mary Oliver selected compendium of poems spanning more than five decades every single day — often in the morning. It’s what I imagine a bird feels when they hop into a really beautiful birdbath with really clean water in it."

"And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag and somehow a dog has taken itself & its tail considerably away into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving behind: me, wag. If you don’t like those lines, you probably won’t like these poems, and I probably won’t like you."

"It’s one of the first poems I memorized for recitation, and when said aloud it’s especially powerful. The dichotomy of the carefree joy and the seething rage rubbing against one another stanza by stanza always felt — and continues to feel — like the perfect maddening definition of the human experience"