The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

"[Barbara Guest's] 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically motivated poetry that predominated in the US for much of her career."—Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest belongs on every poetry lover's bookshelf. This large and lovely volume, as the title suggests, contains all the poetry Guest published in her lifetime, along with a smattering of new, posthumous poems, a partial bibliography, a time line, and a fine essay by Peter Gizzi."—Dan Giancola, The East Hampton Star

"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest gradually reveals and artist's growing expressive confidence and self-possession. Despite the false starts and wrong turns, Guest found a way, mastering the labyrinth of tradition and influence. Her work is a struggle to render the order of perception in language, for clarity of the observed phenomenon."—Robert Huddleston, Mantis

"[Barbara Guest's] 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically motivated poetry that predominated in the US for much of her career."—Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books

"A micro-cinepoetic border-crosser, Guest epochalized here is already well-known for her exquisite, exacting ways of connecting and weaving her way through various modernist and postmodern Avant-garde trends, visual and verbal, including objectivist poetry, Abstract Expressionism, language poetry, etc."—Kyoo Lee, The Brooklyn Rail

"Barbara Guest has created a textually saturated poetry that embodies the transient, the ephemeral, and the flickering in translucent surfaces of contingent connections. These poems unravel before us so that we may revel in them, find for ourselves, if we go unprepared, the dwelling that they beckon us to inhabit."—Charles Bernstein

"Reading Barbara Guest's Collected Poems is like sitting on the very edge of time, as each poem, each book, seems to surpass its own expectations, foraging and inventing in a ceaseless renovation of poetic energies. Barbara Guest envisioned, for generations to come, a future for lyric poetry.""—Ann Lauterbach