Like Grass, Like Atoms, Like Years

“Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn’t water down his poetry… He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines… His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Solonche sees humor and encapsulates it; he frames a thought in perfect verse… He’s playful and profound — the more he writes, the more he seems to know. Beneath the Solonche simplicity are significant social comments, and his goodwill reinforces the best in us.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes… Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly… A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“These poems catch the reader off-guard in playful profundity. While always mindful of the tradition of poetry masquerading as direct statement (the likes of W.C. Williams, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and Charles Bukowski), J.R. Solonche nevertheless “makes it new,” through his masterful use of understatement, aphorism, word play, and anaphora—raising poem after insightful poem from the familiar and often overlooked “little things” of the poet’s day-to-day encounter with the world.”
—Phillip Sterling