VESSELS is a spiritual text, a canticle, but not necessarily a denominational one. A catechism in the sense it is an exposition of belief, where the mysteries of nature & relationships are the divinities. It is a communion with oneself, with others, with the great beyond. It is a thoughtful & thought-provoking compendium of answers to those questions we needed someone more astute than ourselves to ask. -Mark Young

A late addition to the great tradition of wisdom texts, Robert van Vliet's VESSELS attends to what it means to be alive in the anthropocene, an era of climate destruction and dislocation from the natural world. "That is / the puzzle for / every generation," he poses, "to / fix what has / been fixed." The poet's gentle, prophetic voice ekes out an intrepid authority, half-whispered into the ear as "water whispers to / the seed as it lies / on its belly," and the poems function as both meditations and instructions for use. "Speak / carefully," he instructs in one of the book's many near-adages, "or the / listening fish will mistake / your confusion for their order." Guided by gnostic and transcendentalist thought and built on found materials and chance operations, these poems walk a wooded path, where there is refuge, dissonance, ash, strange magic, and where below the observable world is the "unforeseen" territory of the spirit. -Jane Huffman, author of Public Abstract

Written-composed-assembled-or made, through processes both of aleatory and of careful composition, over the course of a moment of profound historical, social, and existential angst, the poems of Robert van Vliet's VESSELS are marvelous, echoing, delicate crystals of profound stillness. They resonate with wisdom-the vivid metaphors of the I Ching, Thoreau's quotidian observations, ancient Gnosis. But these vessels of stillness shiver with the promise of both revelation and obliteration, leaving the reader moved and disquieted by van Vliet's subtle lyric art.-Mark Scroggins, author of Zion Offramp 1-50

In VESSELS, Robert van Vliet works as a medium, reminding us that foundational texts-in this case the I Ching, Thoreau's writings, and the Nag Hammadi library-can constitute us as much as the news cycle. Here, past fortitude and present urgency scrape against each other like tectonic plates. In the tradition of such wisdom literature, van Vliet's poems are koan-like, gnomic, paradoxical, shot through with uncertainty and stitched together with guesswork. But they are also unmistakably tangible: van Vliet shuffles the natural world and fans its elements before us like tarot cards-"a flat cloud stained like a bloody liver"; "a nest of hair above the dry lake"; "thunder swim[ming] over the mountains." The subject matter of VESSELS is nothing less than the act of poetic creation. Van Vliet invites us to consider how and why we make poetry, and how we might use it to survive these times.-Claire Wahmanholm, author of Meltwater