"Tommye Blount's lyrics seem to live outside space and time, blending references to history, art, and contemporary concerns into expanding galaxies on the page...."
— Diego Báez, ALA Booklist
"Opening with a line from Hilton Al’s essay 'GWTW,' (shorthand for 'Gone with the Wind') the searing debut from
Tommye Blountis magnetic and controlled. Through charged words, masterful line breaks, and ekphrasis and persona pieces, these poems blur the line between intimacy and violence...."
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781945588495
— Publishers Weekly starred review
"In this debut collection, Blount considers the Black, queer body as the epicenter of both desire and violence, with the title poem addressing a Black man’s midnight encounter with a police office ('the man in blue') and other poems considering largely closeted singer/songwriter Luther Vandross and one of Matthew Shepard’s killers."
https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=blackvoicesmatter2020
— Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
"Sung through a range of captivating voices, Tommye Blount’s Fantasia for the Man in Blue unflinchingly explores Eros, from its balm for pain to its proximity to danger. These dynamic improvisations composed of different forms and styles make vivid the institutional violence always threatening and often perpetrated upon the bodies of Black people. Blount’s vision is circumspect, clarified by empathy, and his poems simultaneously evoke and illustrate astonishment and understanding, outrage and compassion." --Judges Citation
— National Book Foundation
"The backbone of the book, a quartet of poems called 'Fantasia for the Man in Blue,' originated from two interactions I had with the Novi Police Department. When it happened I felt fractured. I set out writing the book to help me make sense of all those fractured parts, but it turned out to be an examination of the mutability, vastness, and dangers of beauty. When someone or something doesn’t fit a standard of beauty decided by the majority, it is deemed an intruder, and then suppressed, silenced, or killed—as we see so often now. This book is a testament of one such intruder to beauty."
https://www.pw.org/content/a_life_in_poetry_our_sixteenth_annual_look_at_debut_poets?article_page=5
— Dana Isokawa, Poets & Writers