“One of Cleveland’s Most Interesting People” —Cleveland Magazine

“One of Top 10 Poetry Picks of 2004” —about.com

“Rare, young poets have been able to take root in such soil. Few are able to flower with complex beauty. Thomas Sayers Ellis is such a poet and his debut collection, The Maverick Room, is a compendium of lyric gestures compressed into taught chords of meaning.” —Black Issues Book Review

“Poems shift effortlessly into formal registers that give further resonances to Ellis’s knowing switches of code and to this marvelous maverick book….” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] marvelous and accomplished volume…These are gregarious poems, always socially conscious, that never shortchange the intelligence of the reader as they dissect, intersect, embrace, and reject traditional tropes of African American literature.” —Ploughshares

“Since his days with Dark Room Collective, Ellis has always been a poet to watch. Now he’s a poet to read, to listen to, to study…Brilliant.” —About.com

“Dazzles with its dance-beat-quick wordplay, its refusal to follow form, and the risks it takes for the love of sound…His poems sound so good in your head, they demand to be read out loud.” —Ann Arbor Observer

“[A] fine new collection.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Ellis informs his work with language that is edgy and urban, language that moves with a swagger, language that is decidedly not formal.” —The Cleveland Sun Press

“A powerful new voice in American poetry whose pieces run from the political to epochal to the rhythmic and the asinine.” —Coral Gables Gazette

“This book is hip, gutsy, and penetrating; in its pages, politics share the stage with the musical and linguistic pleasures and insights good poetry should provide.” —Harvard Review

“Readers will be better for having seen and heard what’s in the shadow of our Capitol and in Ellis’ perceptions of our world.” —Mid-American Review

“A new and original voice in American poetry.” —Midwest Book Review

“This first book of poems snaps with attitude, pops with energy, and crackles with anger and sadness.” —School Library Journal

"Musically rich [these] poems . . . [are] vitalizing riffs between homage and critique, between the domestic and the political." —poetryfoundation.org

"Energetic and bold. . . . His metier is music, 70s funk and a block party on a sweltering summer night, and in his prose he dances effortlessly between T.S. Eliot to Maceo Parker." —New Haven Advocate