In his hands, poems are at once "wound," "tomb," and "bomb"–sites of injury, elegy, and threat.
–Dan Chiasson,
The New Yorker His poetry was unburdened and unbuoyed, free, breathless, reckless, and jarringly, frankly queer – wicking graceful elegance from grim exile.
–Michael Andor Brodeur,
Boston Globe This notion of the artist as a participant in some kind of sacramental exercise pervades Wieners's verse, whose themes of abjection, rapture, sacrifice, and salvation mean that heroin, bulging cocks, and pleas to God mix freely together, all suffused with a profound sense of divine grace. This makes
Supplication an apt title for the new selection of Wieners's poems.
–Alberto Mobilio,
Bookforum A bridge between the radical content of Allen Ginsberg and the mainstream, Wieners's writing fuses the plainspoken with the florid...Unapologetically queer and overtly sexual, he worries through the reality of gay life in mid-20th-century America.
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Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Important for serious poetry readers and collections capturing poetry's history.
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Library Journal Wieners presents himself as a man of astonishing seriousness, a channel for the occasional prophecy, attuned to literary ambition as to erotic devotion... He comes across as someone with no barriers, a man who could really put on paper the "hurts of wanting the impossible."
–Stephen Burt,
American Poets Supplication is...an abundantly rewarding book, a treasure-house of occult desperation and wonder; a rage against life that somehow hungers for more life.
–Justin Taylor,
Electric Literature [
Supplication] demonstrate[s] the infectious, tumultuous love and joy Wieners took in poetry.
–Patrick James Dunagan,
BOMB Supplication provides a fresh perspective on Wieners's eclectic and idiosyncratic oeuvre, spanning the range of affective extremes that Wieners produced in verse... [It] is an important volume, one that should place Wieners back into the canon of twentieth-century American poetic innovation.
–Nat Raha,
The Critical Flame [What] comes across most strongly in Wieners' selected collection,
Supplication, is a sense of living wild and free while also haunted by death and societal exclusion.
–Arielle Greenberg,
American Poetry Review
