Poetry. "PLASMOS is not avant-garde; it is advanced.... Rachel Daley curates a major retrospective of forms she has invented. The galleries are beautifully built but functional, the art.... More is gained from just looking at these poems than from reading many another. One doesn't 'just look' at them.... Not all fragments are created equal, nor all ellipses full or fully empty. What in most hands (could they get their hands on them) would be mere fragments are composted here. The ellipses allow for aeration.... Sonic, ideational, narrative humus, mature compost.... The mixture of the absolutely impeccable rhythms (lyric, metallic, flat, pert, steady, scholarly, exasperated, reproductive) and the absences and silences deployed over the field of the page is virtuosic. The punctuation itself... The book is humane and knowing; it does not know everything. An advantage is thus gained—it is the most surprising book since The Tennis Court Oath (was), or any other, i.e. in ages. You do not know what is happening—though you can [feel see hear] it doing so. It is not a competition (is it?) but you cannot beat this book.... Daley is brilliant here...throughout.... The best book to read right now is PLASMOS...of the highest order—a benchmark. A book to return to. The bubble in the level"—Andrew DuBoisi.

Author City: BURLINGTON, VT USA

Rachel Daley is the author of two poetry chapbooks, By Beloved: Postcard Series and Today It Starts into Light, and a fiction chapbook, You and Me Story. Her writing also has been published in several print and online journals. She lives with her husband and two sons in Burlington, VT.