Sublimation Point

…[T]he tradition this young poet most significantly keeps alive in them is the great poetic tradition of wit as serious means. In such writing, wit – as the old expression has it – cuts to the quick. (Robert Pinsky for The Washington Post)

Sublimation Point is like a perfect pop song, making the listener glad to be alive. Jason Schneiderman doesn’t strive for complication: he wins us over with rueful plain-speaking. He has Anne Sexton’s directness, Max Jacob’s eye for incongruity. Tragedy enters the picture, and becomes the frame: nowhere do these poems forget their nemesis, mortality. (Wayne Koestenbaum)

Grave, sweetly questioning, often irreverently funny, Jason Schneiderman’s poems about love and death, the Holocaust and family history, self knowledge and self deception give this book a range and tonal variety that is extremely rare for any poet, let alone a first book: Schneiderman has imagined his work broadly, and executed it with great skill, passion, and intelligence. (Tom Sleigh)