Illuminated Edges

Illuminated Edges defeated the adjectives I had prepared for talking about it-its first poem leapfrogged me and I had to turn around and chase it, spluttering. It is a fast book, a strong book, an intelligent book, but its speed and strength and intelligence are animal attributes, fully expressive of its being, none expressed as an effort to impress the reader with ideas about its being. I had thought I might say a few nice things about a perfectly good book of poetry-instead, here I am, gasping like a person who has just seen a sudden, overwhelming vision, pleading with you between breaths: You must read this book.

-Shane McCrae

Perhaps Adam Day is secretly a director. He brings the ingredients of poetry together in a manner that often produces a cinematic mood. This has less to do with his use and development of imagery than the creation of an atmosphere in which the thoughts or feelings produced by the text can't be directly attributed to its particulars. While this sleight of hand (sleight of word?) is common to lyric poets, Day's poems are driven less by sound than the plasticity of language, its capacity to be simultaneously disconcerting and familiar, to hold us, even as it slaps us around a bit. I don't say this by accident, as violence is also a feature of his poems. This is not the kind of violence we fear so much as the kind we can't avoid, the shock and intensity of existence, the physical cost and toll of being alive.

-Bob Hicok

These poems are witty, profane, always a little off-kilter-but concealed beneath all that are wells of emotional complexity, of memory, pleasure, pain, and a luxuriating inappropriateness. Adam Day writes poetry like no one else; his poems have an incredible compactness, a dazzling sense of the possibilities for voice and lyric, and they are constantly surprising in their meditations on sex, violence, abjectness, and the failures of love. I had a hard time putting Illuminated Edges down. And when I did...I picked it right back up and began again, from the beginning.

-Kevin Prufer