What critics say: “With a nimble grace and a wit that qualifies as both a deadly weapon and a sacrament, Jack Anderson’s Backyards of the Universe offers the wry, mischievous shape-shifting poems of city life for which he has long been known and admired–and now he explores time in just the way that for decades he has explored city streets, both here and abroad–with courage, verve, and a keen eye for the details that reveal life’s uncertainties, messes, and losses, as well as its epiphanies: Ginsberg meets Blake. Backyards of the Universe is rich with the mischief and whimsy we’ve come to expect from Jack Anderson–and deepening both the pleasure and the revelation is his persistent questioning of existence itself, culminating in the gorgeous, Joycean “Night Song Naming Night.” Easily one of the most compelling and unforgettable reads of 2017.”—Patricia Traxler
