"Blood Labors is an ebullient and ecclesiastical wonder, capturing more of creation, the uncreated, the recreated than any dozen books on a poetry shelf.... All told, Blood Labors dazzles with its brilliance.
"In Tobin's able and reverent hands, Celan's work is given a new charge for our own times... moving, splendid, and a gifted work of translation." --Eamonn Wall
This is a memorable, tragic, and moving book that should be read by everyone who wonders how we got here and what our being here can mean." — Alan Shapiro
Poetry
“These are very beautiful poems, and The Net is a very beautiful book—surpassingly so. The mastery evident
in his uses of these resources is enviable.”—David Ferry
“Tobin's graceful movement between what's lost and the here-and-now, between earthy popular culture and metaphysical concerns is characteristic of…. a poet fast becoming one of his generation's finest.” —Ned Balbo, The Antioch Review
Criticism
"These essays usefully identify a tradition of twentieth-century Atlantic Irish writing in both Irish literature and American. Tobin's commentaries will appeal both to the general reader . . . of poetry and to the academic reader who has an interest in American literature, Irish studies, and the conundra of hyphenate or hybrid subcultures. Tobin has already established the canon of poetry in that literature with The Book of Irish American Poetry. Awake in America promises to be a useful and popular companion to that book." —Thomas Dillon Redshaw, University of St. Thomas
Poetry Anthology
“...a prodigious and remarkable work of literary scholarship.” —Eamonn Wall
"Radical, modernist, fier, glmamourous, feminist--adjectives and categories can only gesture toward the enduringly significant life and works of the poet Lola Ridge" Robert Pinsky
Essays
Celebrated poet Daniel Tobin takes on the largest questions of the meaning and durability of language to art in his new book, On Serious Earth: Poetry and Tanscendence.