MY FEELINGS [pull quotes]

june 2015

INTERVIEW
With all the blunt meta-sincerity that its title suggests, Nick Flynns fourth
collection of poetry, My Feelings (Graywolf), is unafraid to claim the minds dark
and self-destructive corners as its own . . . Flynns savage lines and elegantly
unraveling syntax reconcile the personal, the cultural, ad the unbearable with the
vital, redemptive power of pain. [Alice Whitwham]
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his fourth poetry collection, poet and memoirist Flynn (The Reenactments)
explores appetite and grief, clarity and absurdity, in lines of great technical skill
and feeling . . . Though there is grief and loss in Flynns poems, there is comfort
in lifes continuity, and the unknowing is rich with possibility.
BOOKLIST
Flynn writes of salt and ash, of things stinging and soluble, of whats left after the
ravages of flood, of fire. Flynn cleans and cauterizes his wounds with the sifting
and stitching of words and lines. [Donna Seaman]
WASHINGTON POST
My Feelings offers no easy answers, yet the writing and the desire for
transcendence make the journey compelling. [Elizabeth Lund]
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Flynn's collection reminds us that feelings come from somewhere, often dark
places, and they are not self-indulgent or gratuitous, but essential, and can be
transformed in the realm of the poem. [Doni M. Wilson]
WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
Theres a kind of humility in Flynns poetry. . . . Flynn is non-linear but you dont
need a map because youll want to take risks with him he bonds us with
words, and vulnerability, providing a cradle for our own feelings. [Grace Cavalieri]
NEW PAGES

Whether writing prose poems or astutely-lineated free verse, Flynns sturdy union
of imagery and rhetoric creates poems whose emotional warmth and logical
clarity lure the reader ever further along the tangled continuum of his haunted life.
. . . Again and again, Nick Flynn considers the immutable borders that provoke
warring feelings in us. To the tension created by these borders standing between
the present and the past, one consciousness and another, and between life and
death, Flynn has written a powerful tribute. [Brian McKenna]
BRAZOS
Considering his past as both a memoirist and poet, its hard to not feel as though
MY FEELINGS is the culmination of a journey, or at the very least that part in a
road trip where you begin to recognize your surroundings and know youre getting
close to home. [BJ Love]

~
BLURB
Nick Flynn keeps resuscitating himself, and in doing so he refreshes and
reaffirms the personal lyric as a crucial and necessary art. I read Nick Flynn's
poetry to feel alive. [Marie Howe]

APR
All poems have some relationship to sentimentality. If the relationship is simply
one of withholding, thats pretty thin. [Joy Katz]
BOOKLIST
Each word is a lit match, a thrown stone, a howling blast, a choking torrent. Flynn
has forged daringly intimate and clarion poems of conscience.
RUMPUS
[Flynn's] books of poetrySome Ether, Blind Huber, The Captain Asks for a
Show of Handsall ask difficult questions and leave us with a beautiful
acceptance that there is often no answer at all, that our memories arrange things

in ways that may or may not offer closure. There is something about his work that
allows us to exhale, to sit in our own messes and be okay.