[Minnis's] verse arrives well chilled. It is served with misanthropic aplomb ... Minnis is endlessly quotable, so one has to work hard not to quote her endlessly ... In Baby, I Don’t Care, one of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time, Minnis is not merely conducting a droll séance with the help of Turner Classic Movies ... [Minnis's] poems marinate in the sort of feelings you don’t like to admit you have. There’s a tang of Nietzsche in her antisocial desires, her amorality. Minnis is a bored, fierce, literate attendee at what the poet Frederick Seidel has referred to as 'life’s cotillion' ... Let’s say you haven’t bought a book of poetry in some time. Baby, I Don’t Care and the reissues from Fence Books could make you come back. You could start here.

Baby, I Don’t Care is not much of a departure—she still wisecracks about her poetry dependency (among other cocktails)—but Minnis makes her methods a bit more transparent, thanking the cable programmers of Turner Classic Movies in her acknowledgments for the lines of dialogue she steals. None of them is footnoted; you’re supposed to guess ... You may find the burlesque overbearing, but you won’t be reminded of the acres of earnest, epiphanic, look-at-me-grocery-shopping-pondering-normal-life free verse of the past half-century, and isn’t that an uplifting thought? Minnis hasn’t forgotten that we have art in order not to die of reality.

Few outright connections are made to classic films in the collection, at least not in a clanging, metatextual way. Instead, the poems sound and feel populated by the crooning voices and boa-wrapped profiles of the kinds of characters in those movies. Noir scenes get torqued just out of normality with Minnis’s off-kilter quips ... One can sense an underlying sincerity to the high-camp romance throughout the book, and that sincerity keeps the form from feeling academic or inbent. This a book that reaches out. The poem titles are structured in the form of wild and narrative ups and downs in the relationship that shape the themes of the poems and the arc of the collection ... Perhaps Minnis’s biggest asset, the one she uses to answer the question of how to write about love, remains her humor ... Minnis’s book presents the small, blessed solutions of lyricism, identification, and humor that make prolonged issues briefly bearable. The book is excellent enough that while it lasts, there is a short while when you don’t, you know, care.

She seems to have taken a tangent into a project that is, to all appearances, less personal than her earlier work. Using a bulletproof persona that admits of no vulnerability, she has produced an odd sort of period piece ... Almost every line in the book—except the ones that refer directly to poetry, or that employ four-letter words that would never have been permitted under the Hayes Code—sounds like it could have been lifted from the hard-boiled repartee from some detective flick of the ’40s or ’50s, or else one of the tougher screwball comedies ... This is Minnis’s reinvention of an atmosphere that feels déjà vu but that she’s conjured out of echoes and resonances. It’s a pre-Mad Men world in which a man is likely to be a rat, a heel, or a louse, and a woman might be a gold digger, maybe even a stinker, and likes to be given jewelry and mink; in which things are ritzy and people go to blazes or feel swell, and what everyone’s after is dough ... It’s all about reading, I think. The book’s 'I' represents the poet as such, and 'you,' anyone who reads the poem; it’s an endless dance of attraction and alienation between text and reader. And though the poems are not that heavy, they have some killer lines in them ... Does Minnis’s attraction/repulsion ploy work? Up to a point. But I’d have appreciated a more condensed sequence. As with any stormy, ambivalent relationship, which includes reading, the ups and downs, push and pull that at first seemed exciting can end up feeling monotonous.

Chelsey Minnis’s latest poetry collection Baby, I Don’t Care announces itself as a sort of poem-movie ... There are delightful shreds of noir plot throughout the book ... That Minnis can reach such prophetic depths of gloom and doom while simultaneously sustaining the integrity of a laugh-out-loud funny persona is a testament to her prowess. This book is an indispensable addition to Minnis’s oeuvre, though she’d likely not want to hear it.

Minnis...impishly taunts the senses in this scintillating vaudeville of vice, greed, and sexism. Through the sassy, vamp-y, diamond-adorned persona of a self-proclaimed 'hungry tigress,' readers are subjected to a sardonic, melodramatic monologue ... With an unparalleled sense of absurdist whimsy, Minnis runs through a litany of debaucherous and obsessive behaviors while engendering empathy, curiosity, and self-reckoning.