Praise for Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden:
“Glenn Mott's epigrams and poems are resting places for a restless mind. This big, generous, thoughtful book is as shockingly fresh as was (and is) William Carlos Williams' Spring and All. As tone—truly many tones—becomes inseparable from thinking, so too do the many registers of humor, elegy, and satire. A wisdom book (with the necessary resistance to over-simplification), Mott, taking up stance after stance, gives us the kaleidoscopic spectrum of what it is to be alive now. This is a book to return to again and again.” —Hank Lazer
"No distance divides Brooklyn from the Bundof Shanghai nor Virgil from the Chinese classics: as demonstrated by the [poet] sinologist Glenn Mott in his Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden, a title that intertwines the Bucolics with a Chinese manual of painting composed in the 17th century. It is a collection of strong Taoist inspiration, with short and often ironic verses that look for enlightenment, also through paradoxes."
—Corriere della Sera
“By cross-pollinating two specific forms, the aphorism and the eclogue, Glenn Mott creates a unique voice able to bridge East and West, past and present. These pieces are discrete, but also discursive—conversing among themselves—richly echoing ancestors such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Pound, Pascal, Montaigne, and the American Transcendentalists. Through playful observations, pragmatic advice, and imagistic reflections, Mott prods 'the inscrutability of the already there.' Jubilantly declaring 'consciousness is the aristocracy of life,' the pleasure he takes in noting and appreciating is obvious—and contagious.” —Elaine Equi
“Glenn Mott’s Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden is a unique compendium of wit and wisdom, contradiction and confirmation. It’s like a mini-library in one volume, generating insight, argument, amusement, and entertainment.”
—Michael Lally
