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I love the clear style, unforced music. It is not so much a strange poetry as the poetry of a stranger, the way Bishop was a Brazilian in Boston and a Bostonian in Brazil. I fell in love with your ‘blue fruit’ and ‘inescapable tomorrow’, also what seems like renunciation not of sentimentality but of cliché …I like even the quasi-Romantic dislocations here: ‘There is a beauty to ice / only a statue understands.’ I’m not a statue, so I only partially understand, but that should be more than enough for Larry Sawyer’s uncanny picnic on no grass … seemed as real as the Bronx, and I couldn’t stop thinking: I am so lucky that this poetry is so good.”

—David Shapiro

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Larry’s poetry gives me the best kind of vertigo: the kind where you’re afraid of falling, but when you do you fall into a soft, meaty, sensual, smart ravine that shakes you pretty good, but instead of killing you it turns you into a Thinking Cocktail. What a scary and fine artist Mr. Sawyer is!”

—Andrei Codrescu

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Surrealist poetry is alive and well and living in America today, thanks in no small part to Larry Sawyer, and his first book, Unable to Fully California gives cause for rejoicing … Sawyer has a comic genius. He also has a Surrealist genius and perhaps a prophetic genius as well.”

—David Madgalene, Big Bridge magazine

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[Larry Sawyer] combines mundane imagist language into a rich new mofungo.”

—Thurston Moore

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Sawyer’s exuberant sensibility has led him to confident lyric expression whose finest moments are beyond context.”

—Tony Towle

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Larry’s a cultural activist warrior trying to spread the necessity of poetry & performance & transformation in the often hard-core hate world of dismal options & entropic slumber …”

—David Meltzer