Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)
Like his poetic forebearers--Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Philip Levine, to name but a few--Daniels' work distinguishes itself from many of his contemporaries because of its sustained commitment to the lives of the people we most often overlook or ignore in our culture. . . .Todd Davis, RattleSometimes we need to read a certain kind of author because we simply have forgotten everything we knew about writing. We think we need a magic pellet, younger energy, more success, or to perform ritual--say like folding our hands and jumping off a building to get started. . . . Jim Daniels, we need you right now because we thought it was too hard to be natural while writing. . . . A real life is here. It lies behind the detail, but the detail is what we want. Jim Daniels' poems are human on the page, growing within and beyond some divine law of poetic order, far away from writers' disasters.Grace Cavalieri, Producer of "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress"A poet adept at folding elegant, poetic cranes from the rough newsprint of everyday life.Christopher Citro, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette