PositivePoetry FoundationMersal’s humor is evident ... Mersal offers a new kind of threshold.
Nina Mingya Powles
RavePoetry FoundationCaptivating and formally various, full of longing and wit, this collection explores language and place, color and cinema...The intimate voice and the recurrent images of rain, in the form of a \'downpour,\' bind the collection in a moody coherence...Dreams, colors, heat, and waves all \'pour\' in and through the poems, and \'downpours,\' by turns nostalgic, sultry, or cathartic, appear in films, memories, and even here, in a burst of rain and color.
Chuan XI
RavePoetry FoundationThe poems in Bloom integrate Chuan’s multifarious literary influences—centuries of Chinese and Western texts—with sharp observations about contemporary life, human nature, and desire...Chuan’s poetry speaks, in Lucas Klein’s translation, in a vital, brash, and, at times, comic voice, paradoxically both cynical and idealistic...The thrill of this collection arises from Chuan’s charismatic voice, vividly rendered by Klein, and the unexpected turns from the intellectual to the sensual, from the absurd to the dead-serious.
Hannah Emerson
RavePoetry FoundationEmerson, a non-speaking, autistic writer, communicates a sublime personal cosmology in poems vibrating with an energy that derives, in part, from surprising repetitions ... Emerson’s work provokes ecological awareness through musings about animal consciousness, plant life, and the paradox of an individual psyche that might engage in an elemental dissolution into snow, sunlight, or mud ... [an] unforgettable collection[.]
