"Walsh crafts poems that take this prickly and hard world and makes them fluffy and soft. Funny, touching, and at times surreal in the most delightful ways, it's impossible not to fall in love with these poems." — Daniel Zomparelli
"It seems improbable that a book of poetry can consistently surprise, but such is the case with These are not the potatoes of my youth. These vital, necessary poems place an invigorating pressure on normative assumptions and perceptions about love, family, friendship, and the world. This is a book that will delight and move readers." — Rhea Tregebov
"The most affecting poems are about family, childhood and being gay in a town where homophobia is pervasive." — The Toronto Star
"The word ‘queer’ casts many shadows. Odd. Funny. Uncanny. Baffling. Matthew Walsh teases out what’s queer about family, time, desire, and the self. An immense curiosity propels his explorations, unearthing scores of emotional and intellectual states. Wit sidles up to devotion. Vulnerability walks hand-in-hand with doubt." — Eduardo C. Corral
"Matthew Walsh dares readers to enter an urban world in which queer rurality is important, creative, poetic, and crucially disruptive to the norms of urban queer life. If the ‘here’ of this book isn’t yours, then get ready. If it is, then wait no longer for a book that captures the impossible queerness of the Maritimes and its effect on more arrogant locales." — Lucas Crawford
"The force of Walsh’s verse comes through their emphatic lyricism mixed with broader self-reflection and, most importantly, a kind of whimsical ecstasy ..." — HAL Magazine
"[A] compelling, original voice. In poems that are equal parts heart-tingling and hilarious, Walsh harvests family history and tales of queer friendship to create a tangled root system of relations. ... Walsh’s predilection for radical enjambments vaults the poems into a register all their own." — Canadian Literature
“Walsh writes with a great understanding of the human and more specifically Maritime condition. ... There are some poems that read like a peek into the eerily haunting thoughts inside our heads. ... A delightful, strange collection, which I will be pushing into friend’s hands exclaiming, you have to read this!” — Miramichi Reader
