PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...metaphor is Diaz’s way of dealing with [her brother\'s addiction]. It allows her to dramatize both his shape-shifting and her efforts to pin him down, and its insufficiency is a big part of the pathos in this first collection ... On the evidence collected in this ambitious, uneven, beautiful book, her skill with metaphor owes much to her being a good listener.
David Baker
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[Baker] can lay down an elegant line when he wants to, but he favors an authenticating roughness to a consoling smoothness; when euphony and precision are at cross-purposes in his writing, euphony yields ... Baker is both an autobiographical poet and one obsessed with ephemerality, which makes the book’s reverse chronology curiously affecting: Parents die and then decline. A marriage ends, then flourishes. A child grows younger. Her parents decide not to have a child yet. It’s as though the book’s structure were another protest against time’s passage and the world’s degradation ... All of Baker’s poems are rich in observation, imagination and memory. But it’s syntax that allows him to synthesize those elements, and to catch his own mind in the act of doing so.
Jonathan Blunk
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewJames Wright: A Life in Poetry may be an unexceptional title for Jonathan Blunk’s engrossing biography, but it’s hard to think of a more fitting one ... Transcendence was his obsessive theme and his lifelong project ... Blunk documents all of this dispassionately, letting the facts of Wright’s life speak for themselves — sometimes to a fault ...resulting paragraphs can be desultory, full of fascinating but unintegrated information ...draws on nearly 200 interviews with Wright’s family, friends and literary peers, many of whom are now gone...in the extensive endnotes that Blunk really shines, illuminating his sources and his resourcefulness... That’s literary biography at its fine-grained finest.
