Critical praise for PULSE
“Irresistible collection of strange, heartsick, shameless, transcendent poems.”
—Publishers Weekly: BookLife“Dirty, human sweetness.”
—Ms. Magazine“Nazos’s formal control is invisible in the best sense; each poem’s architecture feels inevitable rather than designed. She moves…with the confidence of a musician who knows that tempo, not technique, carries the emotion.”
—North American Review“…The poems wear their formal brilliance lightly, leaping and pirouetting with raw, gritty grace and a clear-eyed love of our human brokenness, from which they never flinch. A marvel.”
—Joy Castro“Maria Nazos has written for the world a seismic, incandescent tribute to life. It is devotional with a ferocious tenderness. Here is a poet who can and has resurrected ghosts in our veins.”
—Saddiq Dzukogi “Like a disco ball above a war zone, PULSE pulses with why poetry matters, with grit and glitter. These poems remember what it’s like to be wild and breakable, to be held and to vanish, to run toward danger just to feel the wind.”
—David Koehn“PULSE is a testament to what it takes for humanity to witness tragedy, experience loss, foster resilience, and navigate love in a world that seems set on extinguishing an individual’s chance to live life on their own terms.”
—Chicago Review of Books“A bar-stained voice, raw and unvarnished, yet rendered through high-brow poetic forms that elevate and complicate the narrative.”
—Chiron Review“These poems are gestural, but not performative, relaying stories as they occurred, and as surprised as you are, seemingly, that she made it through, although her fortitude and resolve are certainly evident.”
—periodicies: a journal of poetry and poetics