for The Postal Confessions:
“Like the renegade exterminator in his poem ‘The Termite Confessions,’ Max Garland allows his allegiances to stray to those mortal hungers that undermine the foundations of certainty. Out of such sympathies and a great gift for making poetry out of plain speech, a place and its history are given a voice and a visible soul. Unlike the lonely God of the Sistine Chapel in his last poem, Garland reaches across the space between our lives to touch us, and he succeeds.”—Eleanor Wilner
for Hunger Wide As Heaven:
“I’m a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old time religion than I’ve felt in quite a while. There’s a welcoming world here you’ll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you’ll feel better walking through it.” – Naomi Shihab Nye
“Max Garland finds, in the ‘knottiness/ of things’—wind, tree, bird, sky, water, lights, a father’s milk truck, a mother’s perfume—a music of resilience and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is “a way to speak a loss away,” to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book.”—Ronald Wallace
for The Word We Used For It:
“Somewhere between the joyous ecstasies of Rumi and the sweet and sometimes doleful observations of Whitman, there’s a spot on the continuum of poetry where Max Garland sits and says his luscious, witty, remarkable poems. He gives us the it at the heart of existence, which for all but the finest of artists is all-too-often-unreachable.”—Robert Wrigley
“Each poem is a gift of seeing, a gift of reflection, a mirror for the holy. We, as readers, get to taste what language can do when it melts into our tongues, flavors our lives.”—Kao Kalia Yang
“Max Garland’s long-limbed, resonant poems move with an understated grace that belies their tensile strength. They beg to be read aloud. Accessible, finely intelligent, laced with good humor, his third and best collection yet moves unerringly on ‘the edge of joy/where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do.’”—David Graham
