"In these poems of turnpikes, water, and migraine light, filled with grief and life, the poet tells us it's all right that 'we don't love / living.' Here, precision is a form of metaphor, language a facet of experience; the poet writes with a kind of allusive purity and vulnerability–'each thought a texture'–that I find moving.
Rise and Float is that rare thing, a book of one striking poem after another. If I could write something as tender and nearly perfect as 'You're the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With'–a lightning strike, Randall Jarrell might have called it–then I'd consider giving up writing."
–Randall Mann "If the job of the poet is to make our interiority knowable and known, then this book by Brian Tierney triumphs. In this magnificent debut, a poet arrives to us fully formed, and Tierney has found ways to transform the mundane into the mysterious, and the mysterious into the transcendent. Readers will be swept away by the rigors of syntax, the sparse and charged diction, and the voice of these worldly, humane, sophisticated poems."
–Mark Wunderlich "Brian Tierney's
Rise and Float is resonant with the desire for rapture and the never-easing reality of loss. How do we go on living, these poems seem to ask, bearing what we must bear? And in lines by turns dolorous and defiant, they answer: We watch, we remember, and we sing."
–Tracy K. Smith
