Around Here

Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes.... Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly.... A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations.

-Kirkus Reviews

These poems catch the reader off-guard in playful profundity. While always mindful of the tradition of poetry masquerading as direct statement (the likes of W.C. Williams, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and Charles Bukowski), J.R. Solonche nevertheless "makes it new," through his masterful use of understatement, aphorism, word play, and anaphora-raising poem after insightful poem from the familiar and often overlooked "little things" of the poet's day-to-day encounter with the world.

-Phillip Sterling

The tone is established from the outset: wry, wise, sardonic and playful, drawing the reader irresistibly in. Solonche is revealed as a philosopher in the mould of Wittgenstein: aphoristic, charismatic, acerbic and oddly mystical. If you met this book in a bar, you would definitely want to take it home with you and every day thereafter congratulate yourself on how lucky you've been. But that is true of all his books.

-David Mark Williams