PositivePoetry Foundation... a century’s worth of grief and joy come together in a \'glorious algal bloom,\' which is both an image of belonging and not, a place at once fated and also elusive. Such are the soft contradictions of Tenderness, which feels remarkably porous, attentive to the minute, and hesitant to equate intensity with meaning ... These poems demonstrate that you don’t need plot to arrive at insight or discovery and that devastation need not be the only mechanism for catharsis In \'Thinking of Romanticism, Thinking of Drake\'...the syntactical choppiness of these lines makes the uplift feel surprising and suspenseful, underscoring the possibility that though we begin in sadness, we may yet end up in the sky.
Craig Morgan Teicher
PositivePoetry FoundationCraig Morgan Teicher writes with a dreamy, dark humor of middle age, suburban parenting, and nuclear family life ... The book is at its most deft and the poet at his most mortal when talking about sleep and wakefulness. Between these two realms, there continues to be the hazy routines of keeping alive, but at the poles of consciousness drifting in and out, in poems such as \'Late Fireworks\' or \'Dialogue between Married Poets,\' the book enters an exquisite uncertainty where the poet, free from his daily realism, can play, flirt, sing, breathe.
Tishani Doshi
RavePoetry FoundationAn ambitious and exploratory book about the contradictions of aging, feminist archetypes, and historical and contemporary ruins. Doshi’s poems encompass multiple registers of language, at times shifting abruptly from prophetic...to rhetorical...to cheeky ... At its best, the effect of this tonal scaling is wonderfully surprising ... Doshi’s careful portraits of women complicate popular culture’s fetishization (or neglect) ... There are moments when a poem’s reliance on shifting registers can begin to feel a bit formulaic ... But, my feeling about Doshi is that she is good at many things and therefore has choices and has to make choices about what word suits the mood, what voice suits the volta. Few are able to write with such range of sensibilities, which are, in a sense, nomadic and voraciously searching ... The route of her future work has me curious. And waiting.
