Praise for I Tell You This Now



When I read Daniel Lawless's poetry, I feel as if I am in the

presence of an understated visionary. Deeply personal, his poems

move on two levels- they are both in the world and looking down

at it, as from above. They are poems of the ordinary and of a soul

seeking redemption. They are poems of memory and suffering,

longing as well as of celebration, insight and blessing. I am in awe

of this poet and of this ingenious and luminous collection, I Tell

You This Now.

-Nin Andrews

The essential humanity of Daniel Lawless' voice hall marks I Tell

You This Now. The poems are narrative yet complemented by an

imaginative filtering of the actual world, supported by an

exceptional eye and ear for the plaintive detail of the past. These

poems are honest, credible, and compelling as they excavate the

light of meaning each poem reaches for and grasps. I love the

idiosyncrasy combined with clarity, and how what is often a

surprise, (a linguistic prize) in the line or paratactic leap is

absolutely necessary to the thought, soul, and emotional center of

the poem. This is authentic, expansive, and conceptually balanced

at once-a remarkable lyric depth and appreciation of our lives.

-Christopher Buckley

The poems in Daniel Lawless' I Tell You This Now evoke the photos

of Diane Arbus in that they might make you want to turn away, but

then only to turn back and go deeper, as he does, to find the

humanity in this complex, difficult world. He mines photographs

both real and imagined to create fresh, startling insights that sustain

us, like the small daily joys of "...lumbering the cha-cha as she

boiled the green out of Thursday cabbage." The collection

unspools in one long, magnificent section-nothing to slow down

or stop the accumulating momentum of these brilliant flashes.

They're like old flashbulbs that briefly blind us as they sear into our

consciousness. Death and illness hover over this book, as they

hover in our lives, even as we hurtle ourselves forward. As Lawless

writes, "how the dead live on/These scraps of memory we feed

them like dogs./Always hungry, come-calling us by their name."

There's a brilliant darkness to these poems that are full of light.

-Jim Daniels

Daniel Lawless' I Tell You This Now is an exceptional book--a book

of unflinching, immense candor and excruciating irony. "Your dead

father who is beautiful like Quang Duc setting himself aflame/You'll

announce to the night-nurse, vaporous with morphine." It is, as

well, a book of elegies in which the standard modes of presiding

over bereavement do not apply. The book is haunted. The dead

walk. And they die in sanitariums, soiled hospital beds, and iron

lungs, and in poems of wildly unwinding page-long sentences of

extraordinary vigor and figuration. I Tell You This Now is a

completely engrossing and disquieting work. I recommend it

wholeheartedly. I am gratified to have read it.

-Lynn Emanuel