PositiveThe Iowa Review...Leidner doesn’t so much aim for Nietzsche as shoot for perpetual brain spasm, a sort of intellectual pleasure buzz built on the evolution of a comic theme over lines ... The simile that bonded you to pleasure is suddenly a dark kind of super glue, and your hands are hopelessly stuck to the book’s terrific cover image, also a collage by Leidner. You might feel a little sick after awhile, a kind of candy-coated gut rot, but that’s what the other poems are there for—and love ... Love saves Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me from becoming the sophisticate’s bitter Tweet fix, and in this regard Leidner takes his place beside comic poetry greats like Richard Brautigan and Ron Padgett.
