RaveThe New York TimesI have found myself flipping through it all the time (but usually when the twins are napping) for an impromptu shot of delight. The book revives the persona of the downtown flâneur — it’s full of nods to Prince Street and Cafe Orlin and the Strand — and reading it feels like wandering around that pre-pandemic metropolis that we’re aching to get back to. From a business standpoint, the timing of books (and movies) tends to be arbitrary — they’re released when they’re ready — but every now and then a new one seems to dovetail with the cultural moment. Love and Other Poems is an example of that. It practically embodies the phrase \'breath of fresh air.\' It comes to us in the midst of widespread loss and grief, with faint signals of hope on the horizon, but it nudges us (if I can borrow a line from a poem by the Nobel laureate Louise Glück) to \'risk joy / in the raw wind of the new world.\' ... Dimitrov’s lines are clear and conversational, and if you happen to detect an immediate and uncanny resemblance to Frank O’Hara — the flow of city streets, the openheartedness, the easy swing of the words, the exclamation points — well, that’s intentional ... Dimitrov removes the academic armor of convolutedness and simply comes out with it — how he’s feeling, where he’s going, what he’s wanting. The result is refreshing, especially right now. His city and his stanzas bristle with life.
Jorie Graham
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewShe knows how to get your attention. As you move through the book...poems like \'I’m Reading Your Mind\' and \'Rail\' dare you not to get pulled into their riptides. From its opening page until its final lines, Graham’s 15th collection of poetry has the heightened urgency of a young writer’s debut. True to its title, it hurtles forward. Poems pour forth, frothing and pooling and threatening, at times, to overflow their banks ... Runaway taps into a free-floating end-of-the-worldness (is there a German word for that?) that so many of us feel even if we can’t express it ... Runaway feels as though it has been written for right now, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic, but also for a target audience that might emerge 100 years on. You imagine someone in the future flipping through it, finding a record of a great unraveling, and spending hours trying to decipher it ... the churn of Graham’s language settles into a benediction that couldn’t be clearer[.]
Ben Lerner
MixedThe New York TimesThe book comes across as such a cerebral curio that it’s almost impossible to describe ... Mr. Lerner skates across this frozen lake of pique with delicate skill. His probing mind works in his favor: He’s virtuosic in picking apart a weak lament about poetry from a 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine. What works against him is the curiously airless, antiseptic nature of the enterprise.