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