Reviews of Sky Lounge

Winner of the 16th Annual Lambda Literary Award

“Mark Bibbins’ Sky Lounge, experiments with stripping away nearly all traces of narrative to leave us with poems that proceed by building images and emotions, piling them one on top of another…. Sky Lounge is filled with poems that play with form and language, and that are ceaselessly inventive and experimental.” —Lambda Book Report

“In a sea of prosaic poets, Bibbins’ range, reach, and refusal to be easily categorized make him deliciously relevant.” —The Gay & Lesbian Review

“Imagine Vladimir and Estragon have changed their names, slipped into our century, and become so thoroughly distracted by piped music that Godot is the one who waits. This is the world Mark Bibbins has achieved in the phenomenal Sky Lounge. Here poems are narcotic ambles among prepositions that refuse to position, fix or point us in any final direction. Time, these poems rakishly understand, will never run out. Or it is better to run out on time than to connect the self to that which is mortal. A remarkable achievement.” —Claudia Rankine

“I love Sky Lounge. Mark Bibbins splices together idioms and idiolects into cool, smooth, transporting lyrics—compact monologues that also resemble plays, explosive and evaporating, with no wrong moves, and with a welcome surplus of charm. He is an aesthete, but he is not obsessed with artifacts; the objects of his regard are moods, as they manifest in words. His poems are exactly what I want to be reading right now.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

“Mark Bibbins’s poems zoom in on the minute gestures of social life and the products that attend them. In this world between desolation and wonder, “the orange smoke of the plastics/ factory is/ beautiful against the moon.” Under staccato rhythms and clipped everyday speech, an emotional depth gradually builds as its bright surface flashes by.” —Peter Gizzi