PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMany of Lockwood’s titles are grabby, over the top, titillating and outré...many of her characters are grotesques, cartoony, pixelated dreams ... Usually these characters are uncomfortably childlike, or hypersexualized, or both ... Pointless weirdness gets old fast...but here the weirdness almost always carries a magnificent, and political, point. If sexual and social norms make some of us (especially the young) feel monstrous, out of place, unheard, unprotected or out of control, then Lockwood will speak for the monsters ... Like the best stand-up comics, Lockwood seeks honesty, an honesty inseparable (for her) from the jarring, the awkward, the malformed, the disconcerting, from the tones and topics (especially sexual ones) usually excluded from polite company ... with its extended figures, its theme-and-variations structures, its spirals and twists away from (and sometimes back toward) ordinary speech, Lockwood’s new book rewards rereading. She is never subtle. Her work could seem dated soon. But those limits should not occlude her strengths. She has written a book at once angrier, and more fun, more attuned to our time and more bizarre, than most poetry can ever get.
Richard Powers
PositiveSlatePowers' insistence that we make one another up, that our personalities coalesce from clouds of floating information, practically requires reviewers to call him 'Postmodern'; some would link him to Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, even William Gibson. Yet Powers is less these Postmodernistas' companion than he is their opposite: warm where they are cold, lyrical where they are clinical or satirical, most involved where they would be most distant. Powers wants to know not how and why we fall apart, amid paranoid systems, but how (with the help of the arts and the sciences) we might put one another together ... The Echo Maker makes a decent introduction to Powers, though Galatea and Prisoner's Dilemma remain better places to start (the former if you enjoy 'science fiction' in the conventional sense of the term, the latter if you do not). What is unusual in The Echo Maker, besides its intricate plot, is Powers' interest in nonhuman nature, in the countless species of plants and animals that have no beliefs but that now depend on our care to keep them alive.
Robyn Schiff
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...constant worry gives rise to constant pleasure in these fidgety, hyperintelligent poems. They swivel and leap from topic to topic, delighting in uncommon facts and far-fetched analogies ... Schiff can be overwhelmingly, distressfully critical, of herself and others. She can also be deadpan, or wryly funny.
