Critical Assembly

John Canaday has given us a unified series of poems that may well stand among the greatest works of poetry in this twenty-first century."" - X. J. Kennedy, author of Nude Descending a Staircase

""Human frailty and genius, human work of horror and salvation, human foibles and superhuman forces: in Critical Assembly John Canaday deploys lyric poetry, with terrific formal intelligence, to tell anew the enduring, fate-ridden story of the Manhattan Project."" - Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate

""The Manhattan Project now has its Poet Laureate-Historian. Canaday's Critical Assembly is a tour de force of poetry and penetrating history that bores brilliantly into the Los Alamos experience to reveal the inner thoughts and lives of the Promethean community that altered humanity's fate during World War II."" - Martin J. Sherwin, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer