Adams has the right combination of world-weariness and thoughtfulness to guide the reader past frustration, disappointment, and sometimes resignation into a reduced, purified space for poetry. In his poems, we can laugh at the excesses of the past while preparing to build a sadder, truer world out of the ruins to come, or at least have a laugh that "even the language of ruin gets run-down," while memories of hips (an heiress's, maybe?) and artisanal bakeries in Columbus fly by, refusing to console us. An acquired delight.

-Jordan Davis

It's very cool, in this present life, to be able to attest to the intellect, importance, and unsuppressable humanness of Past Lives from V. Joshua Adams. These poems are written with a captivating sort of rapturous flatness, situating cultural history and discourse against a backdrop of clergy, cops, and the ordinary objects of the world. I'm so drawn to the singular strangeness of the language, the phrase "Missing the Forest for the Forest" and the toast "To the end / of the end of ideas!" One poem mentions the "dangerous thing" of "imagining a future as good as the past"; here's hoping we get a future as good as Past Lives.

-Natalie Shapero

Past Lives is mysterious and alchemical, it is the seaside floating away while eating a plate of mussels in the evening and listening to the shells drop one by one into "deep yellow bowls." The speaker of these poems is sophisticated, funny, sensual, and bewildered in a way reminiscent of John Ashbery. There is something gorgeous about the way Adams's "crystal bullet eyes" aren't just taking in the world, but capturing the world in flux, each moment brimming with imaginative excess. This book reminds us that our past lives are evershifting "ghostly canopies," that glisten when we give them language.

-Sandra Simonds