<br />‘Dan O’Brien’s poems are powerful and stripped down, but they expand in the mind long after they’ve been read. As in <i>War Reporter</i>, O’Brien captures the reflective gentleness that exists amid the damage of experience, and survives it.’ – Patrick McGuinness<br /><br />‘Dan O’Brien’s direct and sometimes stark but never simplistic poems explore the difficult complexities of boyhood, and growing up, and growing older. The painful loveliness of O’Brien’s language reveals the confusions and aspirations of the self, and the self among others, and the perilous world beyond the self.’ – Lawrence Raab<br /><br />‘Moving through his American childhood into adulthood, through a wide world shattered by broken people, he finds redemption everywhere and it’s a gift to his readers. O’Brien supplies the satisfactions of a rare imagination at work, a poet who has taken risks, exposing his deep anxieties, finding himself again and again.’ – Jay Parini<br /><br />‘Slowly, steadily, <i>Scarsdale</i> draws you into its world, so full of suffering and cruelty and yet a strange kind of hope and by the end even catharsis … O’Brien must be commended for his great bravery in releasing these poems into the world.’ – Jeremy Gordon, <i>The Quietus</i> <br /><br />‘<i>Scarsdale</i> is a masterclass in how to engage with memory and make of it something honest, an individual story yet also something universal.’ – Andrea Porter, <i>Ink Sweat and Tears</i>