Resonant . . . Stunning . . . These poems, with their careful word choices and refined music, demand multiple readings and reveal more each time. The collection, like two dying friends in one piece, leave 'A shape distinct and present in the mind.' --Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

[Pinsky's] poems are methodical, carefully built, heady . . . gently sarcastic, and very good . . . But, Pinsky also suggests with no small amount of irony and wit in this prescient book, we've left bread crumbs in the language to help us find our way back to sanity, if only we'll follow them. --Craig Morgan Teicher, Los Angeles Times

Pinsky's erudite, jaunty, and finely distilled lyrics keenly consider genesis, ancestors know and concealed, enslaved and displaced, and our myriad attempts to define the cosmos and ourselves. Pinsky offers cunningly piquant catalog poems: biblical, skeptical, whimsical litanies of our endeavors and failures, from language itself to myth, religion, dance, jazz, and comic strips to war and environmental decimation as we spin round in perpetual desire and denial. --Donna Seaman, Booklist

In his latest offering, Pinsky, a three-term U.S. Poet Laureate, visits a foundling hospital to discover the past. Pinsky, who started as a jazz musician, excels at figures of sound--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and assonance. --Library Journal

In this ode to Mind, mind, mind pulled/ Taut in its bony shell/ Dreaming up Heaven and Hell, Pinsky celebrates the individual imagination while complicating the idea of single point of origin or influence . . . Relatively spare poems offer sweeping meditations on history. --Publisher's Weekly