Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008: Fiction and Poetry: "Tragedy and triumph travel side by side in these poems. 'I couldn't tell you where the Lord was traveling,' Shapiro writes. 'And as he passed I saw / he no more thought of me / than a train thinks / of the sparks scattering / under its iron weight.'"

Los Angeles Times: “These are songs not of innocence, but of experience, the work of a poet who understands loss and longing but also knows enough not to be subsumed by them, to appreciate the small illuminations they allow.”

New York Sun: “Consistently eloquent poems.”

Philadelphia Inquirer: "A profound meditation on the elusiveness of happiness - and the way it can be a slow form of tantalizing torture."

The New York Times: 'In ''Tantalus in Love,' Shapiro thinks incessantly of loss. A marriage fails, loved ones die, the clock steams pitilessly along; meanwhile, the quatrains run on time… Shapiro handles these universal subjects with acuity… In the poem ''Anger,'' is to die for; you can't decide whom to like less, and that's what keeps the poem interesting."

The Charlotte Observer: "UNC Chapel Hill poet Alan Shapiro again dazzles us with his linguistic layups."

Booklist: "This book of poems in which not a word seems mischosen is one of the finest examples of the new secular poetry of illness and death that would assuage grief when the consolations of religion ring hollow."

Virginia Quarterly Review: "Caught up what is being told, one yet puts down the book with a sense of being strengthened, cleansed."

PW (starred review): "Tightly wrought and compelling...a volume to remember."

Nominated for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award

The Los Angeles Times: "Shapiro, not unlike Auden, closes his wordplay with a certain shy irony... We come away from Shapiro's book with an intimate appreciation of the little subversions that poetry can work in one's life."

Chicago Tribune Books: "[Shapiro] seeks what lies at the deepest level of the human heart to mitigate his -- and our -- separateness from others."

Publisher's Weekly (starred review): "He is an acute observer of moments, people, art and language. And he packs even seemingly simple stories with many layers of meaning... He shows us the power and the importance of transformative art in life."