1 // These poems are built tight. Tight I tell ya.

2 // This kind of precision. Precision I tell ya.

3 // Elizabeth Marie Young in addition to being a wildly inventive poet is also a Classics scholar.

4 // It’s been a while since a book sent me scurrying for the dictionary, some examples: penetralia / pluots / orrery / ubicomp / angustifolia. Don’t let that put you off. Embrace your ignorance.

5 // In light of this insane abundance of language and the enthusiasm with which they were obviously written, I’m going to recommend some romaine hearts with avocado lime dressing.

6 // These prose poems are decidedly visual in their approach and that is one of the things I love the most about them. Naturally they call to mind the works of visual artists such as this.

7 // Within each piece the subject is handed off from one sentence to another like a baton. It slides and eludes – at speed.

8 // This is not to say there are not subjects or subject matter, rather it amasses like a cloud bank.

9 //I think the intensity of reading these poems requires an equally extreme experience. Like a Finnish sauna.

10 // Another piece that came to mind while reading this.

11 //The titles of her poems are something to be envied. Some choice picks: Don’t Get Me Started, Pink Eye, It’s Just Part of the Décor; Inside the Bleary Pyrotechnics of This Glass Menagerie; and No One Hears You Laughing at Yourself Inside That Marble Cube. They are all that good.

12 // One wonders how these open plan blocks were built? Where they composed in a high-fevered fit of streaming lucid lunacy? Where they a bunch of random sparkling fragments strung into sentences and later lined horizontally into paragraphs? I couldn’t find angry interviews with the author so for now we’ll just have to gaze in stupefied wonderment.

12.5 // Buy