"The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." --The Village Voice
"There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poems of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms.... They are very moving, very memorable." --Poetry