“[Welish’s] writing is marked by the legacies of multiple modernisms and by sly misprisions and recursions, an obsession with logical forms that flip abruptly into their shadow selves."—BOMB
“Welish’s poetry, like [Thelonious] Monk’s music, is a montage of moving parts in which you’d be wise to expect the unexpected… Welish is sharp about the muddle that is almost everyone’s daily lot.”—Hyperallergic
“PARAPHRASE, HERESY OF. This entry in an encyclopedia on poetics has something to say about poetic language that by definition keeps distant from scientific iteration. But So What So That proposes something else, and throughout are statements and citations as well as swerves from these, grafts and translations as well as swerves from these. Speech turns into writing, and writing turns into sprechstimme. Here are new paths for the mind; for the voice, possibilities that no one has heard paraphrase. So What So That extemporizes on the question: What is the same?”—Aaron Kunin
“Marjorie Welish’s So What So That is at once meditative and noisy, a charting of the obstinate continuum of consciousness and a scattergraph of words and phrases assembled—as in the music of one of her poem’s subjects, Iannis Xenakis—stochastically, open to chance and never to be predicted. These poems are also synesthetic, throwing ‘flatted fifths into the kiln,’ which could suggest a ‘fragmented’ subject in postmodern parlance but, in fact, expresses the unique collusion of color, tone, and text—the distinctive klangfarbe—of Welish’s sensibility. Finally, these poems are engaged—the ethics of art, politics, and language comprise the binding undertone—and though ‘difficult’ at first, So What So That is a tour of a mind enviably open to everything but ‘negatively’ (in Keats’s sense) skirting conclusion.”—Brian Kim Stefans