The Throne of Labdacus

"Everything about the new poem feels inevitable, and everything in it conspires to project a sense of the inevitability of art, of poetry . . . The strange and thrilling arc of Schnackenberg's career has taken her backward through time . . . to a place where, as in Eliot, past and present, classical and contemporary, the august and the mundane, come together in astringent—and deeply modernist—harmony."—Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Review of Books

"Rich, even ornate at times, Schnackenberg's poetry carries its weight as if it were no weight at all, partly by its thematic intensity and partly by the sheer beauty of its imagery."—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Schnackenberg stands out among younger American poets for her ambition, in the best sense of the word. Her verse is strong, dense, and musical . . . Behind it are formidable masters, Robert Lowell most notably, but also Yeats and Auden . . . [Hers] is a very rare achievement in contemporary poetry."—Adam Kirsch, The New York Times Book Review

"Ultimately, The Throne of Labdacus is about the source of poetry . . . [The story of Oedipus] proves no less mysterious in its greatest literary manifestations than in its ancient, preliterate origins, except that out of suffering, injustice, sin, and unanswerable riddles the music of literature emerges."—Phoebe Pettingell, The New Leader