The Blue in the Eye of the Girl from La Jolla

"With graciousness and brevity, Eric Linders poems paint images elegant in their tautness and rich in complex observation. Like an unconventional spy he rejects stealth but prefers to lurk openly in order to seize the moment and capture it with his snare of words -- before it escapes and evaporates into the general population never to be seen again. His are poems of remarkable clarity, richness, and a confident wit that is more than content to fly under the radar. -- Bob Staake, best-selling author and New Yorker cover artist
I heard a famous poet read at Rosary Hill College in Buffalo, and he related how horrible an ordeal it is to write one of his poems. I believe here the opposite is true in the work of Eric Linder. Congratulations to him for this collection. I have admired his work for years, and it is clear that he enjoyed writing the poems, and the joy of that is many times repeated, manifested in the reading of them. It is something rare for me that I was sorry to see the books end, and peremptorily I can say it. I read a lot of quite wonderful poetry, and this is the best book of poems Ive read in twenty years. -- Michael Casey, author of There It Is: New & Selected Poems and past winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize for his book Obscenities