"Anthony Cappo's voice is distinctly American-with Springsteen's fondness for storytelling and O'Hara's playful juxtaposition of images, the poems in When You're Deep in a Thing are steeped in loss and desire. The book begins and ends with 'the old story' of the speaker's father leaving the family, and throughout the book Cappo proves Falkner's truism that 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The ramifications of this abandonment ripple through the collection, making the young speaker a self-proclaimed bully and the older speaker alone again after a series of failed relationships: 'I'm an open vessel-grief, loss, have at me.' While fully acknowledging the cruel vicissitudes of time, aging, religion, and politics, there is an enduring hunger for life in this work. The central question of the book is 'where/to put all this love?' Cappo puts it all into this art he has created."
-Jennifer Franklin
"When You're Deep in a Thing is a book of gorgeous immediacy and depth. You can enter a poem as you might walk into your bedroom; it can open spaces like the night sky. The title poem accesses the human core so swiftly, so quietly, so honestly-our isolation and connection in a breath-as I write this, I want to read it again.
Cappo's voice is intimate, but the arc is visceral: 'come with me and I will show you/fissures of men.' His poems aren't looking for alchemy, only for what's real, this world in which a child might 'endure/like an Arctic explorer.' They are true, meaning: wholehearted and ambivalent. Cappo won't show you prefabricated emotions, rather the contraries we wrestle as we try to conjure our destinies 'under God's random jackhammer.' He charts an America of absent fathers and thrift shop hand grenades, an era in which the line between common sense and paranoia is fading. When You're Deep in a Thing isn't just beautiful-it's courageous and necessary."
-D. Nurkse