Reviews of Cocktails

“No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible. With his open-secret sexiness, his confident collage effects and his grave subjects, Powell could reach far beyond the segmented audiences most poets now expect: poems like his can open up new fields, where fascinated readers might roam or graze.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Powell develops, one could say…into plangently sustained monologues burning with spiritual paradox, a shocking fusion of transcendence and abjection, jubilation and disease, devoutness and sexual ardor.” —Boston Review

“Powell's third, and best, book completes his much-talked about trilogy about growing up gay and uneasy in the age of HIV—and about living with the virus himself…. Not a journey to miss.” —Publishers Weekly

“Powell’s poems sing with exuberant highs and sobering lows—all in the shadow of AIDS.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Powell combines intertextual references with long Whitmanesque lines to create often rollicking poems that delight and challenge, speeding us from insight to insight in a rush of recognizable images and sensations.” —Lambda Book Report

“Powell has produced the real thing: poetry that compels, entertains, enlightens, moves, and, especially, changes the reader.” —Contemporary Poetry Review

“Cocktails is the third book in a triptych of strangely beautiful poems kindled by the poet’s riposte to the AIDS pandemic. Powell has developed an unmistakable style, the world of which allows him to be as literal or transformative—and as narrative or associative—as he needs to be.” —American Poet

“This is true art—the voice that struggles to speak of pain without allowing the struggle to take over, and in fact makes beauty of the struggle with grace, as a dancer does with gravity. This is honesty—a breath of fresh air in the literary world we inhabit, one rife with narrow egoism and pretension. This is Powell’s highest gift—the ability to reveal the astonishing beauty of truth.” —Perihelion

“Powell’s diction is wholly original without sounding contrived—a beguilingly difficult task. In couplets, sonnets, or his signature long, collaged lines, Powell’s half-broken grammar creates a stark, distinctive music that rings almost perfectly true.” —The Antioch Review

“It’s a blur of linguistic play and allusion, and somewhere in there is the speaker whose flesh-and-blood self is impossible to read without the language of cinema, TV, gossip-rags, and music. And therein lies the beauty of Powell’s work. The poems are pyrotechnic displays—lists, internal rhymes, neologisms, narratives halted by free-wheeling lyric—that refuse categorization.” —Pleiades

Praise from writers:
“In Cocktails, D. A. Powell’s lens for examining reality and society is fitted with a very modern filter—passionate Wit. With his customized lens and a dynamic focus, he shows us something both new and reminiscent, deeply incongruous and familiar. What is it like to live and love, he asks, after cocktails, entertainment, and art? By breaking up grammar, the line, and common associations, Powell rejuvenates poetry.” —Carol Frost

“Like Powell’s other books, this is startling, but this is startling in a new way, toward its close sounding more like Richard Crashaw—with its rich and elaborate religious imagery, its saintly foods and fabrics—than a casual modern poet.” —Thom Gunn