Joshua Corey

With Selah Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets who apply the fundamental poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the reader through Corey's extravagant, playful, fantastical, and profuse otherworld.
— Robert Pinsky.

Corey's is an almost manically intelligent voice, and Selah is full of high-wire acts.... Verbal daring is a specialty here. Corey's lines swoop and dart without ever losing their reference to the gravity of the real world: "Her hair was my bouquet of calf- / skin gloves. It glowed like butter / turning bad..." "You straddled past and put me in your pocket." "The lips of water / kiss me into a chamber, into a basement / where pipes have burst." In the masterful "Echolocation Suite by James McNeill Whistler," the poet's pyrotechnics dazzle us almost to the point of blindness. But this isn't just sparkle; there's a deeply felt connection to emotion and the terrible cycles of life as well.
—Time Out New York

Joshua Corey’s book maps new territory in the indefatigable search for an adequate form of elegy. These poems meditate in a timeless manner on the terrible NOT at the center of death, but they do so to new music, one that embodies sly humor, formal invention, and rhetorical bravado. They are original, sophisticated and unabashed.
— Mary Jo Bang

He has gone so far into disillusion and aporia that he seems about to emerge out the other side, as through one of those suddenly wavering, watery space- and time-walls in a science-fiction film. What if it is as he says: 'my mouth is full of his breath. / His tongue is in my mouth, and his name / is every body I see'? Selah: lift up! He keeps you hooked; he keeps you tantalized. — Cal Bedient