“Joshua Corey’s book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing….[A]n extraordinary volume.”
—Paul Hoover
“These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness…. What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confro t altered circumstances, and to assess ‘the shipwreck of the singular’ in the maelstrom of the many….”
—Michael Palmer, from “On Joshua Corey” in Conjunctions
“Corey’s Severance Songs reinterprets the sonnet form. What is a sonnet in the world of Severance Songs? A poem of fourteen lines, a meditation or prayer, a flash of ether fitted with internal and feminine rhymes. There were moments of grandeur, and importantly, fealty to the art of poetry and print culture.”
— Lindsay Illich, Cactus Song