Title: Western Practice
Description: “[*Western Practice*] is a gorgeous almanac of Motika’s West Coast aesthetic. . .”
—*The Poetry Project Newsletter*

“Nervy, desperate, and mysteriously stoic, Motika’s debut is a paean to California’s artists, geography, and history that wrestles with urban diminishment and cacophony every step of the way.”
—*Publishers Weekly*

“Publisher of Nightboat Books, Motika offers generous fractured poems that spread like starfish over the pages of his first book.”
—*Library Journal*

“While there’s a dreamy Venusian quality to Stephen Motika’s poetry, it’s also driven by a care and clarity that animates its landscapes. Western Practice is a book that deserves attention for its rich intersections of projective acrobatics and coming-of-age memory-textures, conjuring the roar of the Pacific at every turn of the line.”
—Lisa Jarnot

“If twentiety century California artists established a tradition of speculative innovation, then *Western Practice* ushers visionary West Coast poetics into the twenty-first.  Motika’s ingenious ear renders place prosodic; his ‘baroque leaps’ tender a sprung rhythm that turns history into ‘a theory at map’s edge.’  The ‘mystic/gather’ of this music give Motika’s ambitious projective praxis visual beauty and structural rigor.  Open this book—’crawl inside & lie down against the future.'”
—Brian Teare

“How to approach a microtonal notation of a life?  Within a diverse field of spacing, Motika’s poem “Delusions Enclosures: On Harry Partch (1901-1974)” scores a biography of the sounds of words and phrases written by the composer himself in and among the poet’s own.  In a way, notes. And a fine debut.”
—Marjorie Welish

“. . .*Western Practice* is a vast poetic anthropology. . .Motika’s poems shed the trappings of the solipsistically subjective, producing an efflorescence of wonder about the world at large.”
—*The Brooklyn Rail*

“Motika’s writing looks and sounds different than his contemporaries’, yet there is no denying the way the light shines on these poems. . . . *Western Practice* does for the west coast what *Leaves of Grass* did for the east: it reveals art in everyday life.”
—*Lambda Literary*
Subjects: Poetry, American poetry, 21st century poetry, Poetry (poetic works by one author), Modern Poetry