Integrity is perhaps the word that best captures this remarkable work, and it starts one thinking about that word in relation to poetry: brainy brilliance, intrepid imagination, and startling word choices that instantly feel inevitable. Dignity. Sincerity. Conviction. And invention: each line is a poem in itself-An onyx finger in a museum of salt takes fire-while the whole book simultaneously radiates its single, monumental poemhood. An amazing feat of linguistic acrobatics, it's a book that never stops opening.

-Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time

Michael D. Snediker bows down to words, their thick ornery meaty succulence, their impossibility, their arcaneness, their status as foundlings and scraps and pillage. In reply, I bow down, with gratitude for Snediker's skill at siphoning verbal gems into every available vein. Every line is considered, chunky, realized; every syllable carries a charge.

-Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Ultramarine

Language, hovering above the word, can weave its own suspended, rippling resonance-web, become chimerical in its transmutations. In Jones Very, here is a language allowed to play in this interstitial space. We are both in archaeity and poking fun at it, in an alchemy where word's textural sounds and meanings come apart and slide back together, and always some danger lurking. Held aloft from surety, the language-machinery of this world unfolds itself into otherwise inaccessible dimensions; from this vantage point, Snediker writes "the pornography of sun-sets btwn the erasure of allegory & the appearance of birds" or "the work of sharpening / emptiness with a jeweler's vast." Space and time collapse in some diagonal relation to the world through this fracturing lens. There is tenderness and maybe a little cruelty here, birds and beasts and weeds and something heavy with the weight of an abstract prophesy lingering in it, cut through every once and a while with a sharp, decisive clarity, these moments stand out, washed clean as gifts, and shining, so that he can write "I want a clover & have just clover to offer."

-Cody-Rose Clevidence, author of Aux Arc Trypt Ich