“Interstate seamlessly connects the state of knowing, in a worldly sense, to that knowing that is deeply felt yet unbodied. The precise attention to the ordinary things of the world, and in particular to the natural world, gives way to the wisdom of the spirit undergirding these searching poems. Reading them, I felt the delights of language in each new revelation: ‘Words were all; / they came to me like birds to a tree.’”
—Natasha Trethewey

“Chard deNiord is a poet who stands firmly in a tradition that weaves Stevens’s philosophical daring to Whitman’s open and unending heart. Therefore, Interstate is a gem of a book about the intersection of light and dark, joy and pain. For deNiord, the erotic love poem can only exist if we can properly contrast it to the heart-breaking elegy. These poems refuse to be nailed down, but they insist on being grounded: ‘They sang ecstatically, as if it were morning,/ although the sky was heavy with evening/ and you could hear the silence in the sky/ beyond their singing.’”
—Jericho Brown 

“Interstate has a fierce engine that is both erotic and metaphysical.  Eros occurs when states are crossed — bitter to sweet, mortal to immortal, conscious to unconscious. The metaphysical experience is like looking down a well. So, if  readers look down its well and expect to see their reflection, they’ll be disappointed, and if they look down its well and expect to see heaven, they'll be disappointed, but if they want to see both, and can live in the shimmer, then this book is for them.”
—Bruce Smith