I swear Kevin Clark's Self-Portrait with Expletives is the book I've have been waiting to read -- the book in which the past and present are not strangers, but lovers. Clark's ecstatic poems time-travel with alacrity on their quest for transformation and song. Intimate, hilarious, attentive, political, Self-Portrait with Expletives is a mature, commanding book by a poet confident in his craft. It's also a book with a wide and wonderful boyish grin. -- Denise Duhamel.

From these pages flows a warm and breathy voice that sings up the Tuscan countryside but also traffics in the quiddities of hardscrabble Americana: beers drunk, cars wrecked, guns fired, songs sung, lovers kissed and missed. It's as though there's nothing this voice can't say; it's personal, provocative, and I want to hear it again and again. -- David Kirby.