"Read alongside the four journals spanning 1955-1969 assembled in Stars Seen in Person, the lilting, drifting highs, lows, and noise of his poems come to feel more like carefully distilled concentrates of his grander, wilder project of seeing, saying, and seizing as many moments as he could. In his early 'Untitled Journal of a Would-Be Poet, ' Wieners turns a crucial corner in embracing the faith in breath Charles Olson put into his 'projective verse, ' and the young poet coming 'back to poetry again' out of 'an admiration of men, an enthusiasm for men, whose whole lives have been devoted to its perfection. Not to poetry really, but to the poem.' A second journal, 'Blaauwildebeestefontein, ' is rich with poems figuring themselves out, brief flashes of budding poetics ('The Known is never complete / enough. It is the unKnown which completes me.'). The third and fourth come from his time in Buffalo, where he went to resume studies with Olson in the late 1960s. Dark and difficult, these entries trace the bloom and failure of his relationship with a woman; they also serve as undercurrent for some of his strongest poems."–The Boston Globe
"Wieners was that rare poet who risked everything for the sake of his art. Just how high he placed the stakes is now made clear by the appearance of his earliest prose work ... in a new omnibus edition of four previously unpublished journals gathered under the title Stars Seen in Person ... From the first pages the reader can't help but be struck by the force of his enthusiasm for things literary and his elevated sense of poetic destiny"–Bookforum
"The newly published journals match and exceed all preexisting Wieners publications ... Journals editor Michael Seth Stewart's introduction and an intimate preface by Ammiel Alcalay do a splendid job situating Wieners as part of 'the occult school of Boston poetry.'"–BOMB
"Stars Seen in Person is an abundantly rewarding book, a treasure-house of occult desperation and wonder; a rage against life that somehow hungers for more life ... There are also great flowing unparagraphed blasts of emotion, infused with Wieners's quintessential, paradoxical yearning for physicality and disappearance, carnality and self-erasure. For him the question was not 'to be or not to be, ' but rather, why does it have to be an 'or' and not an 'and.'"–Electric Literature
"Beware: the electric energy of this avant-garde poet's early work could give you static shock. He articulates so well the heady struggle between writing aspirations and his perceived failures. But he's not immune to heartbreak, addiction, or leaving work unfinished (memorably, one story about a man who is addicted to taking swan boats in the park). There's a gritty glamour to Wieners's journals, which Fanny Howe called 'Letters to a Young Poet in reverse.'"–Kenyon Review
"The precision of observed detail, the unforced generalization, the cosmopolitanism, and the ability to see a few inches of bare skin as metaphor, symbol, or definition–these are Wieners' trademark skills. Reading Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals, with over 200 pages of prose and poetry, confirmed that assessment ... Stars Seen in Person is a good start toward reviving Wieners."–The Gay & Lesbian Review
"This is a harrowing book. A young twenty-year-old John Wieners lays bare his innermost thoughts in a selected journals that sees him living in the snowy wastes of a Boston winter ... The four journals included here are previously unpublished, in thinking about American post war poetry this makes this a doubly important publication, adding, as it does, to our wider knowledge of a poet who while respected and admired by his poet peers, sometimes dipped under the radar in the bigger scheme of things ... With this book and the publication of Supplication, a selected poems volume, it has to be hoped that his star will rise again."–Beat Scene
"[John Wieners] affiliations may define the narrative we use to shape his biography, but the endearing immediacy of the journals and the brisk freedoms of the poetry constantly reintroduce us to him as a sort of artistic free agent. His sacraments and confessions are not meant to lead him or the reader toward a higher state–they simply are the highest possible rung on a salvaging ladder of expression."–Ron Slate
"Like Rimbaud in Season in Hell, or Baudelaire with Intimate Journals, there's an unguarded spark and trust in John Wieners because impulse and imagination reign supreme. In 1955 he writes, "I shall try the only true thing I want to do. I shall go to my poems." Predating The Hotel Wentley Poems, moving through Ace of Pentacles, and ushering us into his life before Nerves, Stars Seen in Person further illuminates John as our future/former best unkept secret."–Micah Ballard, author of Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners
"Thanks to Michael Seth Stewart's editorial legerdemain, at long last we have the magnificent John Wieners here before us, in his full undressed splendor: poet, stargazer, philosopher, shaman, flâneur, survivor. His journals–an inspiring monument, filled with taut provocations and purple illuminations–are valuable as cultural history, as lyric performance, as uninhibited autobiography, and as a motley, genre-defying epitome of gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic possibilities that seem as fresh and enticing as anything being dreamt up today."–Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Pink Trance Notebooks
"These pages of notebooks and poetry–so exhaustively exhumed and returned to light and breath–are equivalent to Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, but in reverse. John Wieners (forever young) evolved through his prose notes towards a sustained poetics of adolescence, holding that tormented phase on a long unyielding band-wave, resisting the sop of adult living with all his might and undergoing the inevitable punishments that such persistence brings."–Fanny Howe, author of Second Childhood
"John Wieners remains one of the best poets of my generation. His work & life continue to influence younger poets. These journals reveal his deep commitment to poetry & the poem; they contextualize his constant questing & devotion to the art. I knew John during many of the periods his journals cover &, as always, remain amazed & moved by his deeply examined honesty & purity."–David Meltzer, author of Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook
