Praise for Sight Lines

"[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience--astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism--and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."--The New Yorker

"Sze's is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human."--Eric P. Elshtain, Chicago Review

"Arthur Sze is a demanding and valuable poet... While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze's poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought--made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship."--Jacqueline Osherow, Antioch Review

"Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts."--Publishers Weekly

"Sight Lines (2019) won the National Book Award for Poetry. This collection contains poems on transformation and change, on the beauty of nature, and on threats of ecological destruction. The formally innovative poems work using associative logic, moving from image to image to create a moving whole."--Book Riot

Praise for Sight Lines

"[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience-astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism--and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."--The New Yorker

"Sze's is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human."--Eric P. Elshtain, Chicago Review

"Arthur Sze is a demanding and valuable poet... While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze's poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought--made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship."--Jacqueline Osherow, Antioch Review

"Sze's free verse emphasizes at once how difficult, and how necessary, it is for us to imagine our world as a system whose ecologies and societies require us to care for all their interdependent parts."--Publishers Weekly

"Sight Lines (2019) won the National Book Award for Poetry. This collection contains poems on transformation and change, on the beauty of nature, and on threats of ecological destruction. The formally innovative poems work using associative logic, moving from image to image to create a moving whole."--Book Riot