“The terrific, Barbara Edelman styled ode holds the scrutiny of a Wislawa Szymborska image and the charm of a Chuck Kinder sentence. It treks inner and outer landscapes, landscapes of song and silence, of immediacy and memory. The spirit of toughness wires every one of these wonderful poems, along with a mischievous candor that stokes trust and intimacy. All the Hanging Wrenches is rooted in the brilliance of Edelman’s debut collection, but the wiring lights up whole new parts of the mind.”

Terrance Hayes, MacArthur Fellow & National Book Award Winner, author of American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin

“If you’re lucky and have been among a crowd mesmerized by Barbara Edelman’s voice, comic timing, and knowingness—a knowingness both cutting and botanical, like a great gin—then you have some idea what awaits you here. These poems prowl and slink. They gambol; they are ruminant; they encircle you and explode, finally, into elegy. There should be much more time, the poems say without saying, ‘to sleep brilliantly, pay attention.; Edelman is a gem.”

Joy Katz, author of All You Do is Perceive, The Garden Room, and Fabulae

“All the Hanging Wrenches, is a spiraling, circling odyssey through languages, the globe, the besieged natural world, and the human life cycle. ‘Each trek has its own syntax.’ These poems nudge beauty out of fog, distances, and noise; they take stock of loss, aging, dreamed and lived realities—each hewing its own syntax marked by flint-struck images, mordant humor, and surprising diction and detail. There are too many taps on the sternum enacted by these poems to list; Edelman’s poetic toolbox has been put to stunning use in constructing this work.” 

Ellen McGrath Smith, author of Nobody’s Jackknife and Scatterfeed