Reviews of Some Ether

“The poems in Some Ether succeed because they employ the best qualities of confessionalism and surrealism, forging an artistic hybrid that we have not yet seen in poetry.” —Boston Book Review

“Some Ether combines nakedness, elegance, and emotional intelligence.  The poems are beautifully clear in their particulars and meanings.  And the question of whether or not the speaker can awaken from the dream of the past, whether telling can effect this self-redemption, whether confession works, is a deeply affecting drama.” —Ploughshares

“There is sorrow here, but toughness, too, and Flynn’s desire to move beyond the shadows will kindle kindred feelings in his rapt readers.” —Booklist

"These poems are expeditions, seeking out alternative ways to love: Plath without the angst and equally memorable.” —Library Journal

“Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut.” —Mark Doty

“Nick Flynn's subject—a mother's suicide, a son's peripatetic childhood—could not be more difficult to approach. If the poems stand ‘close to tragedy,’ as Flynn puts it, they also embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the struggle. And yet the ghost of trauma lingers, ramifying beyond the exquisitely understated endings of Flynn's poems. Even more powerful than the final line of ‘My Mother Contemplating Her Gun’—‘Tomorrow it will still be there’—is the silence that follows it, the knowledge that nothing lasts. These poems establish their emotional authority through their very movement—their wayward, whispering music. At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate, Some Ether promises nothing: it is a harrowing, beautiful book.” —Judges’ statement for the 1999 PEN/ Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

“When both hands are empty what remains is Nick Flynn’s astonishing debut collection. In their roaming uneasiness, these poems enact the hypodermic activity of grief. We are guided by a stunning and solitary voice into lives that have spiritually and physically imploded. No one survives and still there is so much to be felt. Here is sorrow and madness reconciled to humanity.” —Claudia Rankine