“Dan Chiasson is the man we’ve been waiting for—a critic of good sense and grand sensibility, who can respond with alert clear intelligence to all aspects of a poet’s work. Reading One Kind of Everything, I long to be adequate to his receptivity and insightfulness, and it is a testament to his lucid prose that for pages at a time I have the illusion that I am.”

Sven Birkerts

"Poet and critic Dan Chiasson’s debut collection of essays focuses on the role of autobiography in poetry and the issues that arise from poems of personal experience. . . . Chaisson argues that whether a poet is actively employing autobiography or developing personas and barriers that veil his or her true self, it is when the poet engages the challenges of identity in poems that the writing is at its most thoughful."

American Poet

"In demonstrating the prevalence of subjectivity in 20th-century poetry, Chaisson is scrupulous in his attention to detail: footnotes and attributions to recent criticism amplify his developing argument."

Choice

"In vigorous, engaging  essays that are mercifully free of jargon, [Chiasson] explores the role of autobiography in the work of Lowell, Bishop, Bidart, O’Hara, Glück, and the Language school. . . . His earlier critique of the Language poets—that they fail to ’delight and instruct,’ cannot be extended to Chiasson’s book: delighting and instructing is exactly what One Kind of Everything accomplishes."

Ellen Davis | Salamander