"This generous selection from six previous books, with several uncollected poems, shows the consistency of [Shelton's] career and displays a pictorial gift that is truly remarkable: flowing through line after line, seemingly inexhaustible streams of images build an intelligible surrealistic vision, evoking emotional states with great subtlety."

—Booklist

"Shelton's book displays some of the best surrealistic American poetry today, and a steady pattern of growth. . . . Much of the recent work is enormously powerful."

"Shelton's work has enormous variety, both stylistically and thematically. . . . Shelton writes about love and its loss, the death of his father, the scars of a son who never had his father's love. He writes with a singular love, awe and terror of life which lends these poems a haunted beauty."