I Tell You This Now

In joy and terror all at once, the shining elegies and buoyant love
poems of I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless unfold. Lawless
has the uncanny ability to create piercing elegies that behave like
tender breakup poems. His love poems are no less sublime. (After
minutely describing a farmer's vintage tools, he dissolves them to
lingerie... The result is a love poem that ends both very far yet very
close indeed to those historical implements.) One of the deep
pleasures of reading I Tell You This Now is that you never know
quite where you're going until you get there. And getting there
means getting it: the shock of gorgeous and gruesome recognition
in each upturned world in Daniel Lawless's remarkable poems.
-Molly Peacock