“Reading Jeffrey McDaniel’s gorgeously dark and utterly compelling Chapel of Inadvertent Joy reminds me that he is probably the most important poet in America. The book in your hands was written by a master of metaphor and a poet of huge imagination and fierce ingenuity, a fine antidote to realism. Get this voice in your head.”

—Major Jackson

“What strikes me most about Jeffrey McDaniel’s surrealist atmospherics in Chapel of Inadvertent Joy is his ability to bring us together, often ‘half-naked, with the rest of America,  / wearing only a credit card and cashmere scarf.’ Better than the vast majority of poets writing today, he can make a metaphor out of anything—the Olympic diver in the eyebrows of Kate Winslet, the fire licking the hips of the Pacific shore, and the dresses worn by teenage girls made from the skins of apples. With Dante and Tsvetaeva under his arm, he chronicles the emotions that jolt us as we stare into the abyss and pulls us away when we’ve seen enough. Funny and melancholic, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy is a deeply moving book.”

—Khaled Mattawa

“A collection of such emotionally rich, surreal-yet-real poems . . .My initial reading . . . was thirty minutes spent gorging on the excess of dark, beautiful words. But, over the next few weeks, I went back through the book more slowly, mining each poem for flashes of technique, motifs, and the tiny, bold truths that McDaniel drops among these pages like glittering jewels.”

--Coal Hill Review