I Am Flying into Myself

“Remarkable . . . Colored with the originality and lyrical nimbleness . . . This book serves as a treasury of Knott’s colossal talent—a true treasury, which merits being treasured for the way it showcases the range and consistently high quality of his poetic output . . . Lux’s conversational and comprehensive introduction provides immense and balanced insight into Knott the person and Knott the poet . . . Now that he is really gone and this distilled treasury is in print, one of our best and most arresting poets might get the bigger audience he deserved. Bill Knott is dead. Long live Bill Knott.”—Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times Book Review

“I felt surges of jealousy over the simple brilliance of his comparisons. No modern poet I know shuffles together such tenderness of heart with such wild metaphoric play . . . As eccentric in his life as his poems are on the page, Knott has often been considered an acquired taste, but this substantial gathering, carefully edited by Thomas Lux, should secure for Knott an undeniable place on the map of American poetry.”—Billy Collins, The New York Times Book Review

“His insurgent D.I.Y. purity is on full display in I Am Flying Into Myself . . . Knott’s poems claim a peculiar kind of privacy, as though he confiscated his lines from public view in order to mete them out on his own stubborn terms. The result is a tangle of sweetness, irritability, hospitality, and paranoia . . . Knott was a poet of zany precision, the zaniness usually coming right away, often in the first line, followed by quite meticulous workings out of his oddball premises. He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour.”—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“He wrote some of the most brilliant, strange, and subversive poetry America has ever seen. This posthumous selection is an attempt by Knott's longtime friend, the poet Thomas Lux, to organize his legacy and make it presentable. Perhaps something essential is lost in curtailing the chaos that Knott himself created, but we are also profoundly lucky not to have this extraordinary body of work cast into oblivion.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR Books

"Every poet should be lucky enough to have his work edited with such care and discussed with such admiration as Thomas Lux”—The Harvard Review

“I Am Flying into Myself brings Bill Knott’s natural surrealism into acute focus, and Thomas Lux’s introduction makes this doubly true. This visionary is homegrown, of Midwestern soil; he surprises in an original language and sentiment. Always youthful, playful and dead serious, he teases us . . . There’s no other poet like Bill Knott, and this selection of his poems is a windfall for anyone who dares to embrace this eccentric voice made in America.”—Yusef Komunyakaa