“The beauty of Portulans comes not only from Sommer’s formal gracefulness, but also from his matching that virtuosity with mortal stakes. Poems like ‘Incident at the Mother’s,’ ‘Attention,’ and ‘Billy’s Facts of Life’ reveal narrative skill and unsentimental depth of sympathy that little contemporary fiction can equal, while ‘Multiverse’ and ‘In the Basement Is the Previous Culture’ display Sommer’s sheer capacity of imagination. Open to spontaneity while masterfully carved, these poems are alive to our moment, which they will outlast.”

Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls

“‘There are no words / beneath the shape of things,’ Sommer concedes, but his poems almost make one believe that there could be. With the care and precision of a navigator trying to discern paths that won’t simply circle back, he bypasses metaphors gone wrong, riding a syntax supple enough to hold the music of the ‘the mind’s buoyant gravities.’ The many kinds of rhymes in this collection are invitations to listen closely to the layers of history and myth that hum beneath thinking. ‘It’s inner space he’s after,’ and he takes us there.”

Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine

"Sommer explores the internal depths of consciousness with a sly precision that is unsettling and revelatory. Quietly but restlessly, the poems capture fragile analogies for consciousness only for consciousness then to abrade these braided likenesses, to dissolve them, and so the journey begins again, the detritus of analogy left behind like a recursive trail of ruined monuments, markers in a portulan."

Public Books