Praise for More Unknowns:
“To read Alan May’s More Unknowns is to navigate an alluring necropolis in which the signature phrases of our own numbed and bellicose epoch continue signaling through the flames. May’s canny and delicate lyrics remind us that to live in our era is to be proximate to both the technology of violence and its taxonomy; there is no one alive on earth who does not suffer this infernal fluency… Trained in May’s acute and unalarmed gaze, we might be over and not know it, eating at our own profaned alters the dismaying food of the dead.”–Joyelle McSweeney
Praise for Dead Letters:
“…Dead Letters is a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility.”–Maurice Manning
“Only here, in poems playful as they are crucial, whimsical & heartbreaking… can the instrument burn to be sung, its every breath a gorgeous annihilation.”–Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis
“…Dead Letters is a sensuous, lively book, an impressive debut.”–Jake Adam York
“Part Seuss, part Stein, part Brothers (very) Grimm, Dead Letters arrives in a lively blaze of highly accomplished play marking Alan May’s own arrival into the quirky exactitude of his peculiarly fine poetry… Please buy this book & take this ride astride a poetry rich in a nightmarish beauty made of music, image, and vision.”–Hank Lazer
Praise for Notes toward an
Apocryphal Text:
“[Notes…] presents a new poet whose vivid imagination expresses itself in brilliant juxtapositions of imagery and language. His work has an immediate power and, beneath its often-absurdiste surface, is rich and haunting.”–Bill Knott
“The poems…are carefully measured, stark and moving. It is a strong original poetry.”–Simon Perchik
“Alan May’s poems are taut, intense, weird, and occasionally perverse. They are also unbearably kind, consistently funny… Rarely will you find poetry that is both absolutely spontaneous and inherently logical, but May manages that dichotomy with deft and surprising turns of phrase, and with a ferocious resistance to the realm of the safe, the expected, the blandly poetic. In short, this is a poet with an uncompromising individuality. Readers who venture into this collection should do so with a high sense of adventure and with a healthy appetite for risk.”–Inman Majors
Alan May Poet 