All of This Is Ours

Katelin Kelly, Poet and Programs Manager, Austin Public Library Foundation

All of This Is Ours is not a long book, but it covers a wide range of emotion, human experience, and thoughtful reflection, with a certain subtle elegance of language that brings the reader directly into the emotional experience. Bruce McCandless III keeps his emotions just under the surface of the poem, not expressing them directly to the reader but showing the sensations, the actions, and the movements associated with those emotions, drawing the reader in and giving us a sense of sharing the feeling itself. Because the author does not speak too directly about his emotions, but lets the sensations permeate the poems instead, we can feel with him the aching desire to pull into oneself after a breakup in "Aversion," or the odd combination of intimacy and strangeness in "The Hook-Up," or the combination of devoted love and fear of loss that is parenthood in "Ghosts." All of This Is Ours is a wry, tender set of poems on an array of topics, written with an appealing subtlety and a gift for the rhythms of the English language.

Indie Reader

In All of This Is Ours, Bruce McCandless III is at his intellectual best, the fierce power of his wit shining through in funny yet terrifying poems as he confronts his own masculinity and thirst for competition. The poet works with equal ease in form and free verse and ends with tender homilies, in which his daughter figures prominently: "[w]alking back / through stars as / thick as snow.... she says all of this is ours."

Robin Scofield, Author of Flow, Southwest Book of the Year