RaveThe Adroit JournalThe poems in Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float feel as though they’ve traveled a long way to get to the page. That is, the poems feel shockingly precise, refined, and lacking the potential pitfalls sometimes associated with \'debut\' collections. Like crystals that form under tremendous pressure, Tierney’s poems have the shimmering quality of something matured and shaped by the sheer force of time and the deliberate way in which Tierney renders experience. While the poems feel at once lyric, jagged, and interior, Rise and Float as a whole collects gravity, weight, and movement over the course of its five sections ... The book isn’t afraid or shy about its handling of this topic, but it does so subtly, deftly, always with a sleight of hand. Tierney’s poetic abilities only amplify the stakes of these poems—they serve to put further into relief the question of whether or not to keep living in the face of tremendous existential suffering. It is the very precision of Tierney’s diction and syntax that allows him to access revelations of such unreserved honesty ... Tierney’s vision and poetic voice strike me as singular yet allusive, image-driven yet rhetorical, and always laced with a profound emotive intensity. His poems feel as though they are looking you in the eyes as you read them—that level of integrity, and confrontation ... If I seem emphatic about Tierney’s debut, it’s because I am—it is a book that has managed to render acute beauty from enigmatic pain.
