A Certain Clarity

"No less than John Ashbery’s, Joseph’s poems soak up and savor common phrases . . . A poetry of force, and of statement, but somehow not always of forceful statement, Joseph’s is one in which verbal extravagance . . . He is one who derives equal power from looking into violence’s face and turning toward the beautiful as a compensatory violence of vivid sensations in which he rests his moral hope . . . A Certain Clarity is a major work of American art that lives up to its early promise."—Paul Franz, The New York Times

“[One] of our most acute poetic chroniclers.”—David Orr, The New York Times Book Review

“Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes him one of the scariest writers I know.”—David Kirby, The New York Times Book Review

“Joseph is a moralist, and the narrators of [his] poems . . . lash out at the violence of the contemporary world . . . But in his vision violence coexists with, and is occasionally transformed by, beauty and love . . . to create a mosaic that melds seeming opposites—violence and transcendence, ancient and contemporary themes, the quotidian and the exalted—into poems both relevant and lasting.”—David Skeel, The Wall Street Journal

"Almost uniquely among contemporary American poets, Joseph doesn’t retail privities, doesn’t chase the minuscule scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods . . . I remember saying to myself long ago that if you are looking for a poetry that lucidly and systematically offers a sense of this world as a place where things go continually wrong, there is no one but Lawrence Joseph."—Michael Hofmann, The London Review of Books

“Throughout his career (he published his first book in 1983) Joseph has synthesized the unlikeliest lexicons—from legalese and street slang to overheard speech and jargon—and created a taut, sinuous medium capable of handling modern life without sacrificing his ability to sing. His is a poetry of the immediate present built to outlast ephemerality.”—Declan Ryan, Times Literary Supplement

"I’ve been reading and rereading the poems in Lawrence Joseph’s A Certain Clarity with the kind of happiness only truth can bring . . . A Certain Clarity collects the best of his work at last in one gorgeous volume. These psalms of despair and love do the hard, beautiful work of reattaching the body to its labors. Bending over them, reading them close, feels like being an attendant to some kind of holy surgery."—John Freeman, Lit Hub