In his gorgeous and arresting debut, Nick Martino hurtles through a variety of forms—from sonnets to visual poems to works of visual art—to vividly portray and reflect on a teenager’s world during and after the speaker’s parents’ divorce and his father’s incarceration.
—
Craig Morgan Teicher,
Literary Hub,
1 June 2026
After all, no poet talks seriously about doing statistical regression on sonnets to find the optimal ones.
—
Konstantin Kakaes,
Quanta Magazine,
13 Apr. 2026
Besides the Arkansas diamond, New Mexican bolo tie, and Maine’s whale bone, many states contributed commemorative coins, letters from their state leaders, and poems.
—
Molly Parks,
The Washington Examiner,
15 June 2026
Batchelor’s poems have appeared in The Nation, Columbia Journal, cream city review, and elsewhere.
These books can be read as comedies of cognitive dissonance or as melancholy elegies for the very possibility of closure.
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Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
10 Dec. 2025
The deadliest vignettes have silly little comic endings (a motel shootout punctuated by the image of an SUV being towed away from a fire hydrant) while the satin elegies detour into sadistic beatings and scams run on dope fiends.
This climax is steeped in ancient psalms and hymns but also the neat, museumlike minimalism of pop-culture descendants like Ye’s Sunday Service Choir operas.
—
Craig Jenkins,
Vulture,
7 Nov. 2025
Tutivillus, who totted up all the mistakes clergymen made when singing hymns or reciting psalms.
The 70-year-old star has always swung for the fences — often literally, in pastoral baseball idylls like Bull Durham and Field of Dreams — with bold, risky choices.
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