Dreamsoak - Will Russo

Will Russo's Dreamsoak speaks to us with an uncanny braid of eloquence and strangeness, as if simultaneously channeling the rhetorical decorum of Yeats and the hallucinatory power of Rimbaud. Russo makes his poems sparkle in their exploration of innovative forms that scurry across the page, yet he also draws from the oldest sources of lyricism: longing, loneliness, despair, desire, and a keen attentiveness to the world as experienced through the senses. These poems fill me with delight and joy. Even on the grayest days of winter, they are a kind of "[d]aylight / filling the lung of my living room."

• Nathan Hoks, author of Nests in Air