--Jericho Brown
"In Creature, Michael Dumanis measures the divide between the inner and the outer worlds of an accomplished immigrant life. The poet's dark sense of irony provides a temporary relief from the weight of the immigrant loss but it cannot hide an unmoored heart, full of fevered self-scrutiny and longing. Creature is a gift of generosity to a divided, inconsolable human being."

--Valzhyna Mort
"Michael Dumanis's Creature is the poetry book this year you have to read. Steeped in issues of morality, mortality, plasticity, and existence itself, Dumanis paints a picture of life that is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is terrifying. Just as Dumanis writes, 'There's more beyond / but not too much, ' the book asks us over and over again what it means to be a living thing and the answer we are given is not simple or easy to swallow. Each poem's landscape of perfectly chosen and placed language is a land to wish upon. For just as 'Everything will be taken away before it's handed back, ' Creature tells us there is hope after loss, even if it is fractured. There is hope in this book, too, as it speaks: 'I forget my life, but then I remember my life.' After all, there is poetry still to write which replaces the silence of death: 'When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone./ When I grow up, I want to be a book.' There's no doubt that Creature contains the real poetry we have been waiting for for a very long time. Read it and feel your spirit cleansed with the truth of our present and our future--'we, who are about/ to steer our dinghy/ into the open sea.'"

--Dorothea Lasky