...by far his best and most ambitious book to date and one of the best of last year....Vogelsang has found an interrogating voice at once dissembling and direct -- and by direct I mean free of any rhetorical reference that doesn't lead us immediately to his moment. Much of the time the speaker in these new poems is close to Swiftian in his cagey unreliability....Under the surface of the voice, however, is a kind of moral indignation, a menacing anger that is sometimes self-directed. All in all, Vogelsang has created the rare sound of dark, Juvenalian complaint in a lyric sequence whose satiric target seems to be absurdity itself. The tone, in fact -- and this is a power in the best of the poems -- feels barely contained, the ardent big talk almost too big for the imagination asked to hold it. "Big" also applies to the size of the heart in these poems, their ability to find and/or magnify the emotion suddenly, instantaneously.

The world according to Vogelsang is three-fifths reality and two-fifths dream, but the resulting surface is so artfully camouflaged that it's impossible to know which is which. You feel that you are standing on a curb...and that a step in the wrong direction might plummet you into the bottomless pit of a dream. A step in the right direction, however, might land you a little farther up the slope of reality where the air is refreshingly free...and perfumed with a certain spice that leads you to believe momentarily at least that the world has taken a turn for the better and that you are getting your life together. Vogelsang's poetry is both abrasive and generous.

--John Ashbery, in his citation for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series

There are a lot of poems in here but you look far and wide for something really good. I mean, sure, there are the people we already knew were good -- C.K. Williams, Eavan Boland, Frank O'Hara and et cetera et cetera -- but with a book this big you want a few surprises, you want to find some new stuff you didn't know about before. And for me, that didn't really happen. Philip Larkin's "Aubade" is maybe the best poem here -- and maybe the best poem about death ever written -- though what it's doing in a book of AMERICAN poetry I can't figure out (I guess it was just too good to exclude). They put Seamus Heaney in, too, which makes me wonder why they left out Paul Muldoon -- he's been living in New Jersey for years now, and writes poems as good as anything in here (and better than 99% of it). Go to your local bookstore and look through this monster -- maybe you'll have better luck than me, and find something thrilling -- but don't buy it.