A.E. Stallings and Adam Kirsch name ATD among their picks for Best Books of the Year in the TLS.
A.E. Stallings: "The book I most looked forward to getting my hands on this year was Poetry’s second collection, ATD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This is, poem after poem, one of the best volumes of recent years. Comparisons have been made to Philip Larkin – Poetry has a way with rhyme and meter, and his pessimism is as dark as industrial sludge. If deprivation was, for Larkin, what daffodils were for Wordsworth, for Poetry, it’s brownfields and smoke stacks. I’d add Edwin Arlington Robinson to his influences, for the deft portraits, and the first-person plural that functions both as the neighbourhood and tragic chorus."
Adam Kirsch: "My favourite new book of poems this year was The Nightingale Strikes by Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which displays a rare mastery of rhyme and meter while sounding utterly contemporary in its elegiac treatment of work, small-town American life, poverty and mortality."