Mackey isn’t simply playing the part of a poet recounting jazz, he’s fully engaged in the creation of its written iteration, his script a study of rhythm, flow, freedom and, yes, discipline, his words as expressive and imaginative as Coltrane’s or Coleman’s most deviously-conceived notes.

Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist….What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page…[His] handling of history is subtle and immaculate.

Our greatest living epic poet…Mackey’s poetry and criticism…have reinvented modernism for our time.

Instead of accepting the casual clichés which plague musical writing, Mackey adapts a set of stylistics which are uniquely his own: much like those breaths which are prodigiously pushed out of a tenor, a trumpet, or an oboe, the words read as chaotic, harmonious, suspensions of the spirit which one must hear before they may fully inhabit.

Singular, ongoing, great American jazz novel.

A literary adventure of the highest order, a feat of prose and imagination that takes the fiction genre into new territory. One of the most memorable meetings of prose and jazz in English literature.

A poetic lift…wild, free-wheeling spirit…

Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit.

It feels, sentence to sentence and page to page, like a work in the act of being created. It is not simply writing about jazz…. There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. He is the Balanchine of the architecture dance.