…Those moments when what we want to say diverges from what we’re supposed to, are perhaps only as awkward as those in which the two match a little too accurately for comfort.

Across the book, Mutschlecner cradles his layered world “in words that are naked,” in a coherent poetic integrity, with images that melt authentically into the folds of his ideas.

Savich’s own crisis may be characterized as one of alienation from the human, or the “human form,” though in the broad light of day. Savich dwells in an uncanny world, but all the same, one framed by and occupied with such daily objects as windows and vases.

The very privacy of these poems is charged with a sense of another’s presence. In the midst of the first poetic salvo, a long sequence stretched over short, taut lines,

These are urgent poems, made all the more urgent by the apocalyptic-feeling political landscape we’ve entered.

Kearney keeps finding new ways to collage on the level of the sonic, semantic, visual, orthographic, linguistic, grammatical, and political.

Winter balances insight with compassion, and reaches for the ineffable with humility and courage, so that her investigations become our own.

Make no mistake; these are ecological poems, but not of an idyllic moment void of our mark. We are equally part of nature, and our separation has been our folly. What is our story?

Like the best ecopoetry of our age, Sleep Paralysis teaches us to pay attention to the signs of the time: to the endangered animals and human animals that have been reduced to phantoms of their former selves.

There’s no way around it, but there is a way. And that way is to know our own holes, to know ourselves as driven through and perishable, ourselves as riddled by otherness, by otherness we are bound to love.