In the Southwest we have personal agonies that are nothing in the face of that landscape. Then, we go to New York and give self up to being a beautiful style, the New York School (I have done this), remaining haunted. Gabriel Kruis is a really formidable poet. Acid Virga is rather terrifying, also a tour de force and a formal breakthrough . . . a blend of narrative and lyric the way the mind is, mixing New Mexico and New York the way the mind does because it's one mind, or the mind of one body. If you get very fast (using Jimmy Schuyler's short line that after all is kind of slow) you can dissolve all the mental barriers we've been taught to erect between kinds of experiences. “I don't know where I am, what/story I'm telling anymore-” - Alice Notley “Meanwhile, in el mal pais, leaned out on mucinex, mixing dexy cocktails in the haloed pharmacy of the car...” An unusually assured debut, Acid Virga is a memoir in verse cutting between a vivid Southwest upbringing and modern O'Hara hustle in New York City, deeply and seriously reckoning with the psychedelic heritage of religion and the psychological clarity of chemical consciousness. It is both thrillingly propulsive and dense enough to read again and again, always offering up something new. Language is boundlessly specific, evocative of states internal and external, reading at times like a melancholy memoir stuck between stations, an epic poem or even a philosophical tract, always a true and important record of our American lives as lived now-an endless and reliable ticker tape of the soul. More Praise for Acid Virga: "As wildly visionary as it is linguistically alive, Gabriel Kruis's Acid Virga, drills down into the bedrock of American life to produce a book unparalleled in its exploration of how visionary experience and social upheaval collide in ways that are both transformative and annihilating. Like Blake, Kruis "has set his forehead against the ignorant Hirelings" in this series of extended meditations on social decay and religion, erotic life and drug and drug addiction, the life of the spirit and the letter of the law, and the subconscious ways in which relations between parent and child become ghost structures that make and maim us in later life. His disabused yearnings for the sublime are tempered by a fiercely analytical intelligence that allows for maximum fluidity of conception achieved with maximum hardness of execution." -Tom Sleigh "Reading Gabriel Kruis's Acid Virga had a profound and lasting effect on me. I marvelled in his language and formal innovations which are rich with familiar references yet surprising at the same time. Many great poets know how to do these things. What makes this work singular is the more difficult to articulate sense that each word on the page has a double that is working on us... at a cellular level, creating space to connect the particulars of one's life story with the historical. Words serve as flowers with "pastel codes of grief." Or bones the earth wants to cough up. If you've ever been conscious, and felt a little disturbed about it, of life as ancient and ephemeral or that falling apart is an integral force, this is a book to read over and over." -Stacy Szymaszek
