My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan Poetry)

My Vocabulary Did This To Me ... These final words serve as an apt title for Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian's wonderfully edited Spicer collection, the first thorough gathering of the poet's extraordinary and challenging writing to appear since the '70s. --Erik Davis, Bookforum

You finish My Vocabulary Did This to Me feeling you've come in contact with an original artist and a genuine one, a writer who is, to borrow from Wordsworth, 'fierce, moody, patient, venturous, modest, shy'. You also finish the book thinking that these poems are ready to find a new audience. --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

His vocabulary did indeed do this to him, but perhaps with this handsome edition, love and reappraisal will let him go on. --Edward Champion, The Los Angeles Times

Spicer is an interesting poet on several levels, all of them deep and rich with deposits that reward an earnest dig. He is, I think, on a par with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams in grilling the elaborative infrastructure of how we draw or are drawn to specialized conclusions with the use of metaphor, and it is to his particular brilliance as a lyric poet, comparable to Frank O'Hara ... that the contradictions, competing desires and unexpected conundrums of investigating one's verbal stream are made comprehensible to the senses, a joy to the ear. No one, really no one wrote as distinctly as the long obscure Spicer did, and editors Gizzi, Killian, and publisher Wesleyan Press are to be thanked for restoring a major American voice to our shared canon. --Ted Butler, Oyster Boy Review