Measure Press

Dan O’Brien has found what Frost once called “the sound of sense,” has caught the language of people, stripped that language to its bare bones, rattled those bones in ways that make a wrenching but beautiful music. Moving through his American childhood into adulthood, through a wide world shattered by broken people, he finds redemption everywhere, and it’s a gift to his readers. O’Brien supplies the satisfactions of a rare imagination at work, a poet who has taken risks, exposing his deep anxieties, finding himself again and again.

— Jay Parini

Dan O’Brien’s direct and sometimes stark but never simplistic poems explore the difficult complexities of boyhood, and growing up, and growing older. The painful loveliness of O’Brien’s language reveals the confusions and aspirations of the self, and the self among others, and the perilous world beyond the self. 

— Lawrence Raab

Dan O’Brien is one of our keenest observers of domestic life. From the grass growing greener next door, to the wildlife that haunts vacation spots, even down to the knot in a boy’s tie, this book is generously affectionate yet sharply alert to both the details and dramas in family life. Not for nothing can the word “scar” be found in the title Scarsdale, but as this fine poet shows, we can bear the past bravely and come away from it, as we do from his book, deeply enriched.

— Don Share

Dan O’Brien’s poems are powerful and stripped down, but they expand along the mind long after they’ve been read. As in War Reporter, O’Brien captures the reflective gentleness that exists amid the damage of experience, and survives it.

— Patrick McGuinness