"Drawing on a 'cartography of allusions' from Egyptian, Native American, Vodou, jazz, and Anansian sources, and in creating a resonant journey that moves from Africa to the New World, from ancient worlds to our multifaceted contemporary world, T.J. Anderson III explores what it means to be 'a stalker of history' and writes with authenticity, mythic imagination, and verve. With a culminating initiation ceremony that lets a story come and lets it go, Anderson writes in compelling rhythms and delineates how 'writing' is 'but a struggle to employ / the limits of speech.' Devonte Travels the Sorry Route is a singular accomplishment that extends the range and enriches the depth of contemporary American poetry."

"Devonte Travels the Sorry Route works at the 'limits of speech,' syncopating the page to create not so much a textual work as an experience—of language.  Language harnessed by history and histories, by myth, mathematics and alchemy, by pain and loss and, above all, by a formal control that allows these ideas to compete yet work together.  The downward trajectory, the 'sorry route,' of Devonte, the anti- or un-hero, follows a path that appears, in these times, tragically inevitable for the many like him; a path which drives the narrative and provides the structure around which Anderson scores his poetry so as to countervail that overwhelming tragic trope.  Here, in the interstices of time, in the shadow of failed empires past and present, we confront a poetry that wails and mourns like an angry jazz saxophone, weeps in the quiet blue hours, hips and hops across oceans, blasts through all that is impenetrable to shuffle off the yoke of history, crisscrossing and braiding the hidden beauty of lives that insist and resist.  From jazz explosion to flattened blues notes, from the quiet refrain of ancestral laments to lyric couplets, Devonte Travels… leads the reader through time, as Ariadne, Anansi, Damballa, and Toussaint jostle each other.  At the journey’s end we are charged and changed and, despite Devonte’s “sorry route,” strangely made more humble, more willing to resist and yet more compassionate.  The un-heroism of Devonte becomes so much more admirable."

"Devonte Takes the Sorry Route is T. J. Anderson III’s newest collection and one of his finest. This book-length conversation and masquerade in four sections, via the voice and vision of his alter ego Devonte, melds the contemporary and historical, fusing high lyricism and the vernacular to draw forth the ritual and spiritual from everyday language and life, charging every moment it explores with resonant depth and power. Drafting 'alchemic equations,' Anderson creates a series of vessels through which to re-see the world illuminated by his poetry’s singular 'vessels.'"

"The result is a visceral encapsulation of the black experience throughout history—and how that experience reverberates through all history—and an extraordinary character to meet. . . . Anderson really does have a flame in his hand. A strong addition to poetry collections."

Finalist

"'What is writing but a struggle to employ / the limits of speech?' Devonte Travels the Sorry Route is rich with the lessons of that struggle.... These poems are poised— to borrow a motif of the collection — on the outer edge of language, history,consciousness. A fertile zone, and one that won’t reveal its full potential without fuller discussion between a community of readers."