Phrasebook for the Pleiades

Poetry. Winner of the 2012 Cider Press Review Book Award. I am dazzled by PHRASEBOOK FOR THE PLEIADES and humbled, and gladdened, for these are works of strong polyvalence and resonance. They ricochet about the brain and cause that singing linguistic frisson I think of as intellectual beauty, one of poetry’s most scintillating gifts to the life of the mind… Each has the intractability of the ideal: the ideal rider on the ideal horse, the poet knowing when to pull in the reins and stop. I felt my pulse quicken reading these poems and my desire to have written them myself was quickly extinguished by gratitude that Lorraine Doran has. They’re here: they’re in the world: you can read them! Oh please read them. If you care at all about what’s going on in contemporary poetry, you will, and if you don’t care, these poems may cause you to care.–Gray Jacobik, contest judge