“Gibson presents a series of clear formalist poems, each organized around a different kind of patterning. A series of eight seven-line poems—each in the rectangular shape of a painting—examines the life and art of Pierre Bonnard. But the focus is Marthe de Méligny, Bonnard’s lover, model, and eventually, his wife. The eroticism of Marthe washing her feet in a bathtub or being submerged in it naked is balanced by the mention of the objects in the painting where ‘everything alive . . . is dead.’ Add to this grouping an intricately successful pantoum about Diane Arbus, along with my favorite, a twenty-seven-line monorhyme (a tour de force by the way) written in reaction to a photograph of Hermann Göring’s suicide. The radical subjects of Arbus (also a suicide) and SS Commander Göring are brought under control by the imposition of form. The resulting tension shows this exceptional poet at his rhyming best.”

—Billy Collins

“If, as Picasso said, ‘Art is the lie that reveals the truth,’ then Stephen Gibson is on a one-man mission of illumination as he turns his gaze on photographs, canvases, and human history with its wars, murders, and transcendent beauty. Gibson’s voice is unrelenting but tender. . . . and you can’t help but say—Yes, this is our world as seen through the eyes of a human being. . . .  A beautiful collection.”

—Barbara Hamby, author of On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems

“Though the poems of Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror are drawn to the dark—historically, artistically, personally—Gibson’s mission is to bring light . . . and with this collection he takes his place among the few poets who can be called necessary. I don’t know when I’ve been as moved and disturbed by poetry as when reading and rereading this eloquent and arresting self-portrait.”

—R.T. Smith, author Outlaw Style