Stored with boyhood maps and oaths, distressed nomenclatures, and handmade cosmologies, A Maxwell's poetry welcomes the reader into a space that feels at once like a lab, a portable tabernacle, and a meeting hall for sailors and stagehands. Prosaic in its sincerity and dandyish in its startling range of diction, Maxwell's anatomies, odes, and epigrams refresh the uncompromising awkwardness of Thomas Hardy's honest verse, gently and continuously testing for an unlikely isotope of diffidence, wonder, and sociability. Refractory elements of a new tractatus, these curious and redolent books belong in every poet's library.
Daniel Tiffany
Candor is the Brightest Shield’s structure includes “keys” that precede each section-booklet. Against keywords, which proscribe how to read what follows, what concepts are deserving of thought, these “keys” are qualitative and slip away. They fondle the dream of boundedness in the service of rethinking, of no-thought, and this is helpful: “trying to identify, it means / Trying to be mistaken / About something else,” because “The threat of knowing nothing is not the same / as uncertainty, which is the presence of alternatives.” So “Self is an odd couple.” So “Life is the italic, . . .” So “What does it mean to say? : irreducibly human.” So, from here to there, you can do this. With language. So “. . . the cost of the war is provisional but the theory of the war is invariable.” So in The GLAD FACT, the “Peer-to-peer is the art of bleeding through” without blood and we do this, undreaming boundedness. Let's keep this one close.
Diane Ward
I see a mouth in a mirror, an anonymous mouth, or a mouth growing anonymous, de-familiar to itself. I see articulation; the mind, by the way of the ear, to the syllable. There is so much pleasure in, as a reader, re-making the propositions of this work, in playing inside them, in saying, re-saying them. In these pages there is a gentle rigor, an affection and sorrow and attention to speaking and living that is most particular. The asterisk this work makes, on closer examination, turns out to be a real planet, a city, a place. It is certainly alive.
Anthony McCann
