Praise for Into the Hush
"With a mystic's sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, Sze joins disparate realities with . . . poetic bonds of sight and being."―Charles Rammelkamp, London Grip
"The observant and electric Into the Hush by Arthur Sze views any environment, natural or made, as dynamic. A work that acknowledges all the poems that came before to make it possible, the accomplished poet indicates how a narrow field of poetry may offer a wider and deeper view."―Poetry Northwest, Favorites Spring 2025
"Into the Hush, Arthur Sze's first collection since The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), is another reminder that he deserves the lifetime achievements he's been winning on a yearly basis–and a reminder that a lifetime is only one timescale encompassed by Sze's dimension-bending poems. 'Anvil, ' the book's one-sentence opener, superimposes moments and millennia, stacking up seventeen clauses starting with 'when': 'When a black butterfly flits past, // when you glimpse the outlines of apple trees, // when you smell the sprig of sunrise and walk up to the ditch, // when Bering Aleut, Juma, Tuscarora join the list of vanished languages . . . ' Time's top-heavy weight, Sze's last line reveals, is all raw material for the shaping: 'here is the anvil on which to hammer your days–.' Twelve collections in, Sze is still checking off new forms (zuihitsu, haibun, pantoum), and still devising novel ways to compact global English to lyric proportions. One poem begins with the chemical equation for photosynthesis; another lets an eraser speak, and hush up: 'when you look at th q ck br wn f x j mp d v r th l zy d g and find I've lifted all the vowels loss quickens the world.'"―Christopher Spaide, Lit Hub
"Sze's twelfth book of poetry, Into the Hush, experiments with this dance between sound and silence in presenting a startling portrait of the nuclear age, chronicling the plight of vanished languages and species and asking how to live fully in the face of catastrophe."―Tricycle
"Placing a reader in the immediate realm of the poem, Sze wields the ancient tool of the image to produce ever richer sensory places and ideas. A master practitioner of such conjury, he has been at it for some time, writing calm, structured lines that use universal ways of seeing to reveal boundless scientific and spiritual depths."―Molly Boyle, New Mexico Magazine
"Into The Hush is a book of selfless mastery that engages the reader in its compassionate insights and enlivening music."―Brandon Lamson, Bear Review
Praise for Arthur Sze
"Arthur Sze, one of the most acclaimed poets of our time, is celebrated for exploring the natural world, the human condition, and connections between cultures. . . . Sze's work invites readers to deepen their sense of place and reflect on the world around them."―PBS NewsHour
"The poetry of Arthur Sze contains wonder and losses; it's there in his latest collection, Into the Hush. . . the natural world and our place in it, human dramas, history."―Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour
"[The Glass Constellation] is an overwhelming feast, a treasure, and more than enough proof that Sze is a major poet."―NPR
"[Sze] brings together disparate realms of experience–astronomy, botany, anthropology, Taoism–and observes their correspondences with an exuberant attentiveness."―The New Yorker
"Sze's is a deeply humanist and erotic sensibility, utilizing an unadorned diction and language steeped in the metaphoric possibilities that exist for us by mere dint of being human."―Chicago Review
"Arthur Sze is a demanding and valuable poet. . . . While the influence of Eastern poetry is usually felt in American poetry as imagism, in Sze's poems, that tradition is present not just as a quality of perception, but of thought–made available to us in all its complexity through a precision of language so refined that it feels like marksmanship."―Antioch Review
"Arthur Sze is not only one of our best poets, he's now also one of our great translators."―Charles Simic
"If only a few books were to survive civilization's collapse, were to stand as 'poems of evidence' that life once flourished, I would hope Arthur Sze's to be among them."―AGNI
"Sze's poetry invokes an ecology, or philosophy, of interconnectedness not unlike the central metaphor of Chinese Huayan Buddhism–the image of Indra's Net–where all phenomena are single jewels holding within themselves the infinite reflections of every other jewel in existence."―World Literature Today
