"'O Enkidu, what is this sleep that has seized you, / that has darkened your face and stopped your breath?' In Stephen Mitchell’s rendition, Gilgamesh's ravished incomprehension reaches out across millennia to grab us. Wise's relentless and stunning debut takes up a subject as old as written poetry itself. Or rather, she's taken up by it, yielding a booklength confrontation with grief, grappling with the intolerable loss of her brothers, and grappling just as exhaustedly, as inexhaustibly, with the limits of language to express it. The result is profound enough to make praise beside the point. On one page Wise crafts intimate, uncanny images with the precision of Alejandra Pizarnik or Nelly Sachs—'the leaves fall softly on your not-/cheek,' 'between grass and language, mouth'—on the next, heart-rending plainspokenness—'they weren’t parts but that’s how I remember them.' She conjures a haunting and discordant music from brackets, hyphens, ampersands, slashes. And b o y's questions, like Gilgamesh’s, remain unanswerable—a book of tragic wisdom."
 

John Beer, author of "Lucinda"

"'See I lost two brothers,' Wise writes, 'but once I begin, the boys—all the boys—begin to merge.'

Wise's debut book, b o y, is a meditation on loss and grief. b o y is two of Wise's own brothers, and it is those boys she grew up with, or who didn't grow up, who were lost to stunted opportunity and youthful recklessness, to speeding cars, alcohol, and the US penal system. . . . In Wise's tracking of sensation, memories return that resist understanding, and form is continually made, continually falls apart. Yet Wise is unflinching in her effort to get at something elusive and necessary. In poems where absence looms, b o y explores the seemingly irreconcilable: how to let the dead go while keeping them close; how to accept that the fragments of memory one is left with are both partial and whole. . . . Wise's stunning syntax, in lines that tumble, undercut, and catch, creates a form that holds grief, while in its fractures extends a singular beauty."

Michele Glazer, author of "fretwork"

"In b o y, Wise creates poetic forms strong enough to hold the staggering weight of grief and supple enough to be remade by its force. Resisting the desire to make loss 'smaller, less opaque,' these poems are stricken with its large and layered presence. Never has a book of poems felt so much a collaboration with silence. These sequences are less scripts or performances than they are a kind of music heard within and against absence. Wise's writing is gorgeous, transfixing. As only the best poets can, she hears 'not hereness.' 'We just want the feeling of coming up from that dark water—I do— / I want that feeling,' she says. Even if these poems can’t provide that particular solace, they make a language that takes us to something close to it."
 

Mary Szybist, author of "Incarnadine," winner of the National Book Award for Poetry