""Portuguese" is an enthralling testament to a creative mind beset upon on all sides by attempts at calcification and deleterious circumscription. . . ."Portuguese" earns its grandeur with a grandeur of spirit that is nearly unparalleled in contemporary verse. Shimoda's lines are by turns gracefully aphoristic and effortlessly metonymic; they transcend their subject–the author himself–by dint of their intelligence, sensitivity, and spiritual awareness. . . .It is not too much to say that Shimoda is writing, somehow, impossibly, the universal autobiography of a nation. . . .Very highly recommended."
HUFFINGTON POST
"[Portuguese] is, indeed, both strange and marvelous."
FRANZINE
"That day, as the sun was hallucinating, a non-Portuguese boy was being born, and all we know is that he's a poet who brings that sun back to us."
ETEL ADNAN
"Brandon is who I would dream up as a brother if he wasn t mine already."
KELLY SHIMODA
"Brandon Shimoda seems to be an Ur-being, a totally new creature."
TOMAZ ALAMUN
"Brandon Shimoda is my favorite living lyric."
MATHIAS SVALINA
"Brandon Shimoda is a poet OF CREATION, of Heimweh, a main event, a restive-decadent bus rider of nostos and algosis these and also: Portuguese."
QUINN LATIMER
"Brandon Shimoda wants to go to Portugal, where the snow is imaginary and the streets are almost real." BHANU KAPIL
In a temporary world there is only one Brandon Shimoda who can 'Rationalize poetry by embodying it before me' and simultaneously 'Rake the fragments of bone.'"
LAYNIE BROWNE
"This poet keeps himself within his own gaze, as the child keeps in vision the man he has yet to become, and the poems he has written emerge with a form of sight that reaches inward as far as it reaches outward, self's innermost history to this outward moment we call 'now.'"
DAN BEACHY-QUICK
"Looking into the young Brandon Shimoda s eyes I see in a starless night sky the full moon circling."
DOT DEVOTA
"Unless that's a bird on his head, he's stolen my hairmakes you wonder about a lot of things."
BRENT HENDRICKS
"These poems are what a person might think before slipping into grey dream-visions of their own unborn children."
CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING
"Brandon Shimoda's poetry is the most perfect peridot stone sparkling with sharp edges in the daylight." NOELLE KOCOT
"The mysteries of poesis are exacerbated, enlivened, and somehow fevered in Portugueseand without Brandon aShimoda's efforts the scope of American poetry itself would be diminished starkly." JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
"Sometimes there is a poet in service to deliver everything you want to taste in the world. Brandon Shimoda is such a poet."
CACONRAD
"Brandon Shimoda has she-she d a creche of earthly delights vastly libidinal: ravishing, ceremonial word formations, not withstanding the presence of wrath like a raw cake, sponging. BRENDA IIJIMA. Brandon Shimoda: He's SWAMP."
BRANDON DOWNING
"I smell the peat of old woods; two boys & diesel in shallow cups, two girls & bone in twiggy beds."
SAMUEL ACE
"Brandon s is the heroic mechanism which will make everyone love each other with greater truth and intensity, because he lays an equal hive, mouth to mouth to mouth." FARNOOSH FATHI
"WISE AND SASSY, THIS LITTLE BOY! HIS MOUTH!"
EMILY KENDAL FREY
"Yes: in Brandon Shimoda's work poems become further worlds and not vice versa."
KARENA YOUTZ
"Brandon's restlessness translates into disruptive, migratory syntax that defies identity, its logic."
DON MEE CHOI
"Here he is again, Shimoda, weaving, wiring, rigging the "gentle wrath of home" into all things."
ANTHONY HAWLEY
"Brandon Shimoda did not write this book, he wrestled it from the bad, holy woman standing in the purple vetch."
ROB SCHLEGEL
"UNITED SHIMODA IS UNITING THE WORLD."
NATHANIEL TARN
"I wish these poems had not been written."
PHIL CORDELLI"
