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SPEAKING OF WILLIAM STOBB...
"William Stobb has nerve, talent, and engages this madly accelerating, often nearly indecipherable world in what's called real time.  And he manages it without sacrificing emotional force.  That's something special." — August Kleinzahler
"Lit up even through the darkness of mortal disconnect,Nervous Systems charts the synaptic leap between peril and joy, the near rhyme of ruin and rain while William Stobb manages for us 'a party at his epicenter.'  Deep-delved and thrown: 'ha ha time, ha ha vanishing point.'  What a generous invitation.  How could you miss it?" — Dean Young
“There is a strange and elegantly accomplished serenity in the poetry of William Stobb: a serenity of tensions attenuated to their uttermost, of sinister imagery so deeply attended to and known that it becomes adorable.  More than ever before, we need a poetry of hard peace.  William Stobb, thank heaven, is writing it.” — Donald Revell
"Parable, ghost story, lyric, experimental novel, contemplation of history and death while filling the kiddie pool, all find thrillingly new formal play in the poems of William Stobb. Absentia does not shy from the erasures that trouble an attentive mind, but never has absence felt so rich with presences. Stobb writes with ease, wit, conversational jags, and deliciously terse eloquence. The vitality of these poems, the necessity of their questioning, makes life feel deep and strange and satisfying. I so admire this fine work as it quarries that most basic task of asking 'what the day/ requires and what the life.'“ — Alison Hawthorne Deming
“Performance artist, musician, and sculptor Laurie Anderson says: ‘Emptiness to me is expansive. And I don’t have to be there. I can’t exist in it.’ Stobb knows this emptiness, a vastness internalized. He is a poet of the desert. Just as Heizer’s work not only references the western landscape, but is made up of and by that landscape, Stobb takes the ‘inundated or eroded, extended or developed’ language and repositions it into lyric. — Kelli Anne Noftle

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