John High

"John High's poetry and prose bear witness to the tumultuous, sacred resonances of the word as flesh, of lives snared on mortality's hooks, and of love's tender and violent inconsistencies. With a remarkable wakefulness that is both concrete arid transformational, high subtly weaves a world of parables and riddles reminiscent of Kafka and Jabès. We are continually thrown back upon a compassion that spills over the limits of division and separation, where shards of dreams and apparitions cast their lot across the paths of unwitting travelers and solitary monks. The complexity of High's profound caring for the other breathes through every line with a consistency of vision informed by an epic scope and feverish quest for renewal."
"John High's poetry undulates, and yet silence eases its way through all the pages of Bloodline. Redemption hovers, forgiveness is lost and found and often lost again. By way of fragmented preachings, tender insinuations, and nursery rhymes gone batty, High's poetry connects us to each other by grappling with our doubts and the idea of ourselves as witnesses to our own salvation. A strange ellipsis underlies many of High's poems, as if the poems had been construed by penlight, in a desire to get the words down before they fell back again into blackness."
"These poems resemble Tarkovsky's slow pans across a winter landscape. Here are allegories of absent presences, revelations delivered by a dangerous angel. High's words are heavy, but seem to hang, miraculously redeemed, in mid-air."
"Of the choices possible to a poet, John High has chosen the most difficult in Ceremonies: out of loss and absence and despair to make a new world in a new language, to come as close as we can come to apprehending God without attributes, to find a pure place to try to be human in."
"In the lives of thomas, John High re-imagines one version of Southern myth-making and tale-telling as a gnostic text, restoring to some of the fundamental images in American culture an expressive power obscured through years of commercial trivialization and aesthetic distrust. If in its improvisatory order, its revelation of profundity in pop themes, and its swiftly shifting counterpoint there is something jazz-like in High's writing, its language also resembles an old-time preacher's, cajoling, imploring, lamenting, consoling, and witnessing, visionary and exact. This is important work, in search of the tracks even loss and death leave."
"Ghosted. Jazzed. A delta poem-noir complete with alligator shoes, mattress out back, culpable deaths and a doppelganger to tell it to. (Thus) the lives of thomas digress through veiled archetypal passages: 'So go out to the roads, bring those who you find they'll say.' This transcript of lies, stolen between lives, slips through the hard planes of time into an undisclosed surround. The lives of thomas, which is not a story, adjusts, as an eye to the available light."
"John High's writing has an element of music, sometimes a story, in which sensual detail is like 'the changes and shifts of dream that go unnoticed in gesture.'"
"Forms and landscapes as in the paintings of Fairfield Porter--soft light, Motion--but now underscored in positive black, the thoughts themselves, like those of the gnostic Thomas..."
"The Sasha Poems is contemplative poetry of the highest order.... The sentence by sentence run of these moving prose poems will hold you in its gentle grasp for a long while, even after you've stopped reading. John High has here mined his soul for a poetry that will awaken yours."
"Through brief lyrics, prose poems, and long narratives, John High has been steadily refining a hybrid poetical form which is uniquely his own."
"...brilliant journeys into childhood, archetypal presences, and grief.... John High's work is vast, intimate, violent, comforting, and incredibly aware of what it means to be in the world."