The Saint of Withdrawal is a stunning debut.”— Thomas Lux “In ‘Seaside Boy’ the voice of nostalgic yearning asks ‘Dear Mister Misty, how much for it,/how much for all that is misty?’ Eric Schwerer’s poetry is fueled by a sense that something invaluable and numinous waits to be discovered somewhere in the misted swampy layers of memory, back there in the smoldering depths of boyhood and adolescence; at the same time, there’s a sense that discovery and revelation might prove awfully expensive for the psyche. The poems enact a dance between search and evasion, wanting to catch a quintessence that seems to try to avoid being trapped in language. The whorl is muddy but it churns green with close reflection.”— Mark Halliday