Excitement Tax

Dara Wier has written about Cheshirization:

“In nine poems whose tones, tempers, tonics and contents exquisitely mesh, John Emil Vincent carries on an extended conversation with any one of us who wishes to take up where what’s proposed poem by poem takes off into heretofore unexplored zones of our own. We frame what’s next as each new poem frames its contents in elegantly surprising, slightly raucous configurations.”

His previous books are critical. His first book, Queer Lyrics, was chosen as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. Kevin Kopelson of The University of Iowa has the following to say about the book:

“Poetry lovers should be writing love poems to John Emil Vincent and not just queer ones. For he has done something very difficult and completely necessary: performed both formalist and thematic analyses of deliberately ‘difficult’ modern poetry with a view to considering connections between sexual identity and poetic closure. Even readers with an aversion to such poetry will find themselves taken gently by the hand and led through this forbidding terrain by an unusually considerate yet formidably erudite critic. Let’s hope this isn’t Vincent’s final word on the subject.”

It wasn’t his last word on the subject. Vincent’s second book is John Ashbery and You. His later books approaches Ashbery’s recent, difficult, critically neglected poetry with an eye to the pronoun 'you' and an ear to the construction of Ashbery’s oeuvre in the form of discrete book projects.

Susan M. Schultz of the University of Hawaii writes:

“Vincent is a wonderful guide to Ashbery’s work; he has read the books over and again, and his own style often resembles Ashbery’s, ranging from high academic discourse to slang, from poetic to prosaic diction. This is an ambitious work, moving as it does in several directions, and it is eminently readable.”

His most recent critical book is an edited collection of essays about the poet Jack Spicer, entitled After Spicer.

Jay Parini, Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College says:

“After Spicer is an important collection of essays on a figure of increasing interest to all readers of American poetry. Vincent has gathered a range of (mostly) young and certainly vibrant thinkersalmost all of them poets themselves, as well as critics. I found myself stimulated at every turn, glad to have read this work, and newly interested in the poetry of Spicer.”

And Brian Reed at University of Washington writes:

“After Spicer is a first-class introduction to one of the premier American poets of the mid-twentieth century. It covers everything from detective fiction to his gay rights activism. Afterward you will know why so many of today’s poets consider him an indispensable precursor.”

Excitement Tax is Vincent’s first book of poetry.