“This is a big, moving, and intellectually satisfying collection by one of our most humane, wise, and intelligent poets.”

David Rigsbee | The Cortland Review

“Why must the only passionate engagement in contemporary poetry be sexual, and usually elegiac? Eleanor Wilner is passionate about the intermingling of other two taboos, religion and politics. Her seventh book, Tourist in Hell, is redhot and brilliant in how it summons the talismans of Western civilization—Shakespeare and Greek legend—to illuminate our current woeful situation.”

Poetry International

“Expansive and unbridled, Wilner’s poems not only induce the reader to look at horrors and injustices of the past, they also force us to see.”

Alizah Salario | Booklist

“In her seventh book . . . Wilner focuses on history, current events, literature, mythology, and Christianity. She carefully fuses autobiographical details to a larger context, and one hears echoes of the Old Testament, Roman Catholic prayers, William Shakespeare, Arthur Rimbaud, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others.”

Diane Scharper | Library Journal

“In Tourist in Hell, Wilner visits zones of torment and brutality—not because she relishes them, but because they open inexorably under her feet as she goes about the business of being human. An extraordinary volume, one that marks a new, compressed ferocity in Wilner’s project of poetic witness. It feels to me like a necessary book.”

Mary Kinzie

“Wilner is a poet of incomparable erudition and gifts of insight. There is no other contemporary poet who has addressed, as she has throughout her distinguished career, the world legacy of history and myth with such a keen sense of wonder, curiosity, and, in the end, literal re-vision. Tourist in Hell furthers Wilner’s reputation as a great poet of the invisible, the forgotten, and the potential.”

Susan Stewart