“Jim Daniels’ poetry explores not only the realities of a blue collar, late 20th Century, upper Midwest childhood, but the entirety of America’s sociocultural whirlwind throughout these last six decades. Few writers believe more deeply in poetry’s capacity to document the world, and documentation, in his hands, is a form of homage.” —Campbell McGrath, author of twelve full-length collections of poetry
“Jim Daniels is a generous, inventive poet with great emotional range and insight. He is at home writing poems about home—the domestic space, child-rearing, marriage, aging, ambition—with honesty, intimacy, and grace….Jim Daniels is humorous, provocative, and smart—an American treasure.” —Denise Duhamel, professor at Florida International University, author of several poetry collections, including Second Story and Blowout
Jim Daniels is one of our best chroniclers of an American past that is, for better and worse, gone. As such, his is a poetry that laments and celebrates our present moment—its people, the lives they live, the ideas they live by, and the places, people, and things they call theirs. When one of his speakers says, “Today, / I’m just watching. Carried away,” you realize a pact has been made (between the speaker and world) and a promise fulfilled (by the poet for the reader): that these poems will carry you away, that the voice behind them “wants to kneel on the floor / and whisper a prayer / like in the old days.” Now more than ever, we need those prayers, and these poems. — Hayan Charara, author of Something Sinister
“The poetry of Jim Daniels springs from a deep well of compassion for the working class, their plundered cities and their plundered lives. His sharp eye surveys the landscapes of Detroit and Pittsburgh, his uncles struggling against alcoholism, his aunts scraping by on the wages of fast-food restaurants. His clear voice speaks for the fallen, from the company men who played by the rules and lost anyway to a child killed in a hit-and-run accident. Yet the poet finds dignity and redemption in the grace of baseball or the consolation of the human touch, spirituality in spite of churches, love in the mist of pesticide.” —Martin Espada, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, National Book Award for Poetry winner for Floaters
“Jim Daniels keeps getting better, going deeper into his lived life to find there the language of celebration, lamentation, victory, defeat, moral ambiguity, and political and social outrage. He curses what needs to be cursed, he blesses what needs to be blessed, and he stands in silent awe and wonder at the world turning about him, a world of unaccountable suffering and unaccounted-for beauty.” —Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling
