"Like Bukowski and other great American poets who lived their words, Phill Provance mines his soul to bring light to the dark places of life ... and tell a tough story with a hint of humor and horror." John McCaffrey, The Good Men Project

"Ingenious ... I feel like I'm looking into a diorama in a shoebox, a scene and a world dreamily composed within the cleanly-wrought borders of the speaker's imagination ... a little myth with a Midwestern twang." - Diane Seuss, 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist

"The lure of the archaic is a notional time travel in which supposed Denton Morrises may enjoy games of fancy dress and do the voices in decades more forgiving to chiming rhymes. Its comedy arrives in the form of a seriousness of technical achievement belied by a sometime silliness of content. How does one take such poems? I take them as utopian, as belonging, almost politically, to a never-appearing age of poetry that is as permissive as it is beholden to the past. In this unusual poetry of strangely familiar sounds, one discovers a space for rarely seen lyric promises as oddly compacted as they are true." Chris Hosea, 2013 Walt Whitman Award Winner

"I was glad to be introduced to Phill Provance's poetry, which sets itself apart from ordinary competence through qualities of acute intelligence and technical skill. He knows that a poem is a lens on experience and that the best way to represent the multifaceted thing we call reality is to apply to it as many and diverse lenses as you can manage. Here is a book that deserves a cordial welcome." Alfred Corn, 1982 Levinson Prize winner, Academy of American Poets, NEA and Guggenheim Fellow

"It would be tempting to compartmentalize A Plan in Case of Morning in terms of its three sections, 'Going Out, ' 'Going Under, ' and 'Coming In, ' but this collection of poems is equally charged throughout, just as dynamic in its last poem as in its first, and rich with form, from the prose poems 'How It Goes' and 'The Stenographers Union' to 'Elegy for My College Roommate, ' with its carefully crafted measures of white space. A Plan in Case of Morning is a coming-of-middle-age chronicle of sorts, and it is against this backdrop that we find lines such as those in 'Gen Y Love Poem': 'which is to say/I am still in it/for myself/to keep you there/is still the mystery/of whether I will/stay.' Moreover, Provance visits with the interior in a way as dynamic as it is delicious and powerful, as in 'My Old Man, ' where we find the lines 'In three months I'll come home to find him/planted on his couch, the upholstery full/of burn holes, him sucking on tin foil/ "getting the good cocaine out," the desk/clutter in some corner, ' while poems like 'Now' leave a delicious bruise, with the lines 'And it occurs I've wasted/my best words on one/who didn't deserve/a pronoun.' Provance writes, in 'A New Kind of Vegan, ' 'I want to watch you eat my words. Sprinkle/some salt on them. Serve them/on a bed of lettuce skins.' Any reader of A Plan in Case of Morning will be happy to devour." Jacinda Townsend, winner of the 2015 James Fenimore Cooper and Janet Heidinger Kafka prizes

"I really love the collision of the sacred and the profane in many of these poems." Sabrina Orah Mark (Winner of the 2009 Saturnalia Book Prize)