Fear of Description (Penguin, 2019)
Winner of the National Poetry Series
Every scene [in Fear of Description] is laced with a heady sense of the uncanny—both because Poppick is a gifted defamiliarizer of quotidian experience and because his narrator, like many of us, has begun to see everything through a lens of preapocalyptic dread. What happens when the onset of adulthood coincides with an age of ecological catastrophe? When corporate jargon suffuses our most intimate social interactions? Rising to these questions, Poppick never loses his equanimity; he delivers even the worst of news with waggish wit, rhapsodic delight in the possibilities of language, and great stores of tenderness for his friends. MAGGIE MILLNER, THE YALE REVIEW
[Poppick] delights in verbal unpredictability, when figures of speech jump out, or sparkle and shine. STEPHANIE BURT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
No matter where a reader begins in Fear of Description, the end is near and a beginning closer. As far as this book travels, it’s always there to meet itself, though its trajectory is never predictable. Poppick’s stop-motion ability to convey multitude in moments is genius—Merwin-like in its sensorial clarity, and, where the poet chooses formal restriction, Keatsian in density and bloom. BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
A bold book. Through Poppick’s memories we relive that brief window of youth when friendship is the magic audience that grounds us. In a world that seems stingy and random, Poppick and his friends glean meaning from seances, road trips, shared economic anxiety, houses, and shaving rituals. Tears, like the dead, sneak up on them. JENNIFER MOXLEY
In Fear of Description, Daniel Poppick, like many of the most interesting writers of our time, folds the labor of writing into the content of his poetry, stirs it around, and comes up with something genuinely free. The wildness of his lines had me amazed and grateful. LUCY IVES
[A] sage, anthemic collection. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
[Poppick] delights in verbal unpredictability, when figures of speech jump out, or sparkle and shine. STEPHANIE BURT, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
No matter where a reader begins in Fear of Description, the end is near and a beginning closer. As far as this book travels, it’s always there to meet itself, though its trajectory is never predictable. Poppick’s stop-motion ability to convey multitude in moments is genius—Merwin-like in its sensorial clarity, and, where the poet chooses formal restriction, Keatsian in density and bloom. BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
A bold book. Through Poppick’s memories we relive that brief window of youth when friendship is the magic audience that grounds us. In a world that seems stingy and random, Poppick and his friends glean meaning from seances, road trips, shared economic anxiety, houses, and shaving rituals. Tears, like the dead, sneak up on them. JENNIFER MOXLEY
In Fear of Description, Daniel Poppick, like many of the most interesting writers of our time, folds the labor of writing into the content of his poetry, stirs it around, and comes up with something genuinely free. The wildness of his lines had me amazed and grateful. LUCY IVES
[A] sage, anthemic collection. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY