"Alvin Feinman's poems are perhaps the purest evidence of the extinction of personality T. S. Eliot believed was one of poetry's necessities. As an aspiration, extinction of personality is as dangerously thrilling as being exposed to a siren's song. As an achievement, Feinman's exquisite, visionary poems, tied to the mast of their own making, allow us to behold fierce, unyielding perceptions."--Michael Collier, director of the University of Maryland Creative Writing Program and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
"Poetry is making, poesis. And for a time, Alvin Feinman was a maker, a majestic poet who came to embrace his own intolerable limitations, his own dead-end. After long silence, one rejoices in these almost forgotten, rigorous, earthly, purgative poems."--Henri Cole