“Like a wedding dress fashioned from a WWII parachute, Trussler’s poems billow and collapse time and context with hopeful invention. A postcard to the Anthropocene, a staring contest with the frozen clockfaces of a Kienholz exhibition, Trussler’s poems teach us the transformative power of lyric poetry to relieve us from linearity and welcome, with open hands, the ongoing presence of our complicated pasts. 10:10 arrives right on time.” — Jennifer Still, author of Comma, winner of the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry
“The pages in Michael Trussler’s 10:10 feel like sticks and steel being rubbed together, igniting flames. Marcus Aurelius writes, ‘You must now at last perceive of what kind of universe you are a part.’ 10:10 is a reckoning with history, ethics, art, war, and political expressionism, to name just a few. And then there’s art: Vermeer with his ‘light half / way between tequila, frayed lemon, and sand.’ One-minute Trussler is singing the praises of lyric poetry, the next he is sharing the reckoning of knowledge and dreams. What an unusual, mixed media; simply said, there is magnificence here. ‘I have said it before,’ Rilke states, ‘I am learning to see.’ 10:10 reminds us of all the wisdom that occurs beyond our awe and blundering.” — Barry Dempster, author of Being Here: the chemistry of startle
