"The place is Rwanda, the poet is a teacher of English from the American south, the poetry has the loveliness and wisdom of a casual, easy-breathing and humorous voice, able to encompass the clashes and the dovetailings of cultures. So you think at the start, and for a long while. The book then moves slowly from peace to the tides of civil war. Humane, frightening, horrifying, vivid, Burleson’s Ejo does what Conrad said all writing should do: it makes you see."—Alicia Ostriker

"Derick Burleson's wonderfully daring and unified collection of poems about Rwanda is so empathic, so bracing and forthright, so richly humane—at times comical, at times heartbreaking—that we come away from its testament radically deepened, shaken, enlivened, and changed."—Edward Hirsch

"Burleson is the poet in Rwanda the way Vallejo was the poet in Paris and Neruda the poet in Malaysia: in the running, up the country, on the scene. The lines are scrupulous, the movement scriptural in its inclusive justice. This is a very old and honorable poetry, a poetry of news, outraged and doleful, longing for acquittal."—Richard Howard