"Gelman’s Vexations moves in organized disjunction through a winding narrative that insists and compels."

Harriet Books

“Vexations is a brilliant, dizzying, necessarily unnerving take on the project of the state and the varied estrangements on which it feeds. Demanding and speculative, Gelman’s book-length poem names the absurd conditions out of which we (readers), and the text itself, emerge, awakening a rage. The world Gelman creates is a strange, slant rendering of our own, delivering shock after shock of recognition in our reading of its intimacies—clarity, threat, pleasure, dread. Part mother’s account of her life with her young daughter, part encounter with Erik Satie’s nineteenth-century score of the same name, Vexations is a poem, a performance, and a score of endurance. It is a book radiant and terrifying with our time. It is afire.”

Aracelis Girmay and Solmaz Sharif | James Laughlin Award judges' statement

"This experimental book-length poem traces a mother and daughter’s travels through a surreal landscape on the verge of ecological and social collapse."

Publishers Weekly

“Mesmerizing and propulsive, Vexations moves like a snake through the uncanny grass of a creeping dystopia where care blurs with surveillance, small disasters dovetail with large, and too-late leaks into still-to-come. Here, the epic veers eerie and antiheroic, immersing us in a consciousness—in a world—flooded by strange but all too familiar fears. This is an unsettling, flawlessly crafted book by a singular poet.”

Lisa Olstein, author of "Climate"

“With this stunning shapeshifter, Gelman manages to create a remarkable hybrid: a book-length poetic narrative of speculative fiction, an urgent account of a mother/daughter relationship, and a coruscating view of our ecological future. Vexations manages what many of us call literature to do: show us humanity subject to and transcendent of time.”

Douglas Kearney, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Sho"