"Pure and plain, Gregory Pardlo is an American metaphysician. His luxuriant mind is discursive, drawing on many intellectual and cultural traditions, and for him, the world is singularly and greatest understood at its figurative core. You will enjoy best those poems which reveal the intricate journeys by which he fabrics an argument, not with himself, but with the rich legacy of conversations about kinship, history, art, and poetry from which he emerges, and always on top. This is a poetry whose reach will break you and whose achievement goes beyond the accidental discoveries of an eccentric personality -- and thus arrives a poet whose vision is so wide, he'll have readers in the distant future, contemplating his moral and formal choices relative to their own." - Major Jackson

"Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, is a masterpiece of subjectivity, all qualia and stunning epithets, big feelings shaded with doubts, regrets, hesitations and guilt. It is a book with its headphones on, narrating the most amazing music, almost never letting you hear it. Where objectivist poetry vaporizes its big feelings in people-free landscapes, Pardlo’s subjectivist poetry feels all its feelings right up to the border of the interpersonal, and no further." - Jordan Davis in The Constant Critic, 2008

"Pardlo is dealing with a subject whose politics are as complicated and innate to the human experience as the politics Auden wrote about during World War II. Pardlo comes to an argument, but not a conclusion, and it's that limbo that seems to require this particular diction of his. These are serious poems that warrant and reward a serious reading." - Kent Shaw in his blog lots and lots of neat, 2009

"The rich portraiture and storytelling of Gregory Pardlo’s poems offer  the reader a glimpse into the inner worlds of people with whom we may have little in common, but whose humanity touches us deeply and helps us feel intimately connected... the poems are rich in movement, rhythm and energy." - Michele Russo in The Dodge Blog, 2012