"D. A. Powell is one of the two or three major poets now in mid-career . . . We will still be reading D. A. Powell a long time from now, both for the record he offers of the last thirty years of American history and culture and for the new possibilities he has created for poetry. He is both accessible and challenging, saying something new, and saying it newly, with each book, yet speaking with an authority as old as poetry itself." --Craig Morgan Teicher, 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist citation