“Plain-spoken, warm, and affectionate poems give way to deeper observation as O’Connell turns a wry eye on finitude and mortality. These poems never leave us behind, embracing a world in which even a ‘lummox’ (like us) can be ‘gobsmacked’ by ‘so many choices’ that ‘the whole universe seemed possible.’ This is a capacious and big-hearted book.”
— Ronald Wallace, judge, Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry
“Marvelous. Delicate, durable, intimate in feeling, and sweeping in view, At Some Point rewards belief in an American poetry that wants to ravel language, that’s keen to the mesmeric, that recognizes awe can be located in the everyday. Poems like these are what happens when grace and intelligence decide to take a walk.”
— Colin Channer, Rhode Island Poet Laureate
“Consistently spare, precise, and thoughtful, these poems are, above all, intimate. Subjects are not merely observed but experienced and meditated upon until loneliness, joy, and grief are, as O’Connell writes, ‘observed as passing clouds, an innate meteorology.’”
— Gary Fincke