“Profoundly intelligent and erudite, steeped in the metaphysicals, Aaron McCollough’s poems alternately tantalize with their hermeticism and dazzle with their sudden outpourings of radiant clarity. The mirrors so important to this collection are like the surfaces of lakes: protean, dreamy, distorting, swallowing up and transforming everything in their purview, as McCollough’s voracious intellect swallows up language and delivers it back to us refracted, estranged—as the past itself is transfigured by our memory of it. I found myself reveling in this writing, transfixed among the ‘dusty stars.’”—Donna Stonecipher, author, The Ruins of Nostalgia
 

“Searching for a form that observes history and song but falls short of orthodoxy, Salms is a genuine revelation of McCollough’s unique gift to sound out the furious trials of being, with a lens brought right into his soul’s mind’s eye. In line after line, McCollough shocks his instrument into truths that last only until they are uprooted by the next; doubt and faith and love and loss exchange places in a dizzying exchange that is both brilliant and devastating. Salms is kin and heir to the likes of Donne and Herbert and to Geoffrey Hill.”—Martin Corless-Smith, author, The Poet’s Tomb