"Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human . . . I admire these poems immensely, for their deftness with craft, their originality of vision, their ability to fuse old and new without devolving to gimmick-and for a dignity as jazzily inventive as it is sheer." –Carl Phillips, from the citation for the 2001 Boston Review Poetry Contest
"Here is work that manages to be entirely of-the-moment while at every turn it announces (without preening over it) not merely an awareness, but an actual confidence with such prosodic traditions as the heroic couplet and the pentameter line, such cultural and literary traditions as those of the New Testament and of meaningfully comic punning. No fear, here, of heritage nor of music nor, refreshingly, of authority....I admire these poems immensely, for their deftness with craft, their originality of vision, their ability to fuse old and new without devolving to gimmick–and for a dignity as jazzily inventive as it is sheer." –Carl Phillips, from the citation for the 2001 Boston Review Poetry Contest
"In Cocktails, D. A. Powell's lens for examining reality and society is fitted with a very modern filter-passionate wit." –Carol Frost
