I'm a creative writing student at Miami University, the Ohio school where Reiss teaches composition. I think the other reviews pretty much speak for themselves, so I'm just going to point out that the publisher of this book submitted it for consideration of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And now I'm going to go log into our course scheduling site and try to get into one of his classes.

James Reiss' new book is notable for its verbal energy and play of diction and sound, an exploration of ethical and personal psychological situations and universal dilemmas. His wit is a way of confronting the sadnesses of our lives and times. His poems explore the inner and outer landscapes of a contemporary, deeply feeling and thinking human being. His most remarkable quality is the development of an engaging, confiding, colloquial style that is direct, down to earth and quite convincing in his unabashed and honest explorations of his subjects. At the heart of his poems there is an emotional, emotive voice without fear of sentiment. Yet the style is most interesting: a voice supple, flexible, personal and personable. This expansive expressiveness seems the basis of his ever-more (with each book) ambitious poetic explorations of forms and content, expanding into larger and more encompassing narrative elements. James Reiss' fine sense of emotional location "places" his active lines inside his personas' and his characters' psyches--and ultimately in ours.

Ten Thousand Good mornings by James Reiss is a modern day classic. Reiss' is eloquent without being pretentious and by using the rules and forms of a thousand years of english he puts his own life, todays ideas and situations, into verbal symphonys even the worst of philistines would marvel at. Poetry in this new millenium takes a strong second to the larger media of television and film but, it's writing like Reiss' that shows us the power that the writen word can still have. Reiss' poems show the beauty and poinency of one mans memory, real or not, comedic or tragic, each line and each page deliver vivid pictures and deep emotion; creating images that I will never forget.