Reviews of Graft
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“In this ruthlessly intelligent book, the map becomes the territory as ‘the eye claims for itself one last view.’ The terrain shifts and blurs the way that the syntax shifts and wavers, fluid and brittle as glass. Through the lens of these lucid lyrics’ entranced disenchantment, we’re presented with a double vision ‘thoroughly smudged with mistakes.’ The mapmaker loves and ruins with the same gesture (those errors are meaning itself), and Brian Henry neglects neither the palpably sexual love nor the bracingly ugly ruins: like the man in ‘The Company Not Kept,’ ‘he aligns sight . . . wayward but wary.’”

—Reginald Shepherd

“I honor and admire these poems for their groundwork understanding. Here, oppression is shown forth as a condition of language, a violence of syntax. And here, in resistance to oppression, extraordinariness lifts a beautiful, if harried, affirming sound. With signal integrity, the poet exploits no popular catastrophe but chooses, instead, to enter the mythic heart of catastrophe, there to make new myths.”

—Donald Revell, citing Graft for the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 George Bogin Memorial Award

Praise for American Incident:

“[American Incident] offers versatility, up-to-the-minute references, and edgy verbal fireworks framed by a remarkable range of forms . . . The volume represents an advance on Henry’s previous poetry not only in its startling quantity, but also in its quality: it will match, and perhaps extend, his growing transatlantic reputation.”

—Publishers Weekly

Praise for Astronaut:

“Astronaut firmly situates Brian Henry among the constellation of those who are ‘raising not hell, / but the stakes.’”

—Noah Gordon, Boston Review

“The diverse voices, monolithic images, and indefinable moods of Astronaut’s sometimes maddeningly elusive beauty repay a long, lingering look. Henry is a unique new voice, subtle, original, affecting . . .”

—Lavonne Leong, Oxford Poetry