The quirky and witty imagination at work in these poems brings to light a linguistic world full of the delightful turns of day-to-day speech, structured within a poetics that foregrounds the phrase as a unit of measure and syntactical syncopation as a measure of rhythm. A.L. Nielsen’s verse operates across a range of cultural, musical, and social reference— sometimes within a single poem—that is often astonishing. At a time when work that explores the nexus of the personal, the sociopolitical, and the cultural sometimes results in dour, moralistic self-righteousness and virtue testing, it’s delightful to read poetry like Nielsen’s, which is at once keyed to the peculiarities of our time while being so much fun to read.

—Geoffrey Jacques