Ron Silliman lives the most passionate life of the mind in America! He is a political poet par excellence. . . . Silliman is a poet I read to break through into new halls and colonnades of verbal richness that, before, I simply didn't know were sealed up behind these walls and deadends in the palace of art. His work must be studied, lived with. Its pleasures cannot be simply lapped up off its surfaces. But they are the subtler, sharper, and more resonant for the time they take to taste. — Samuel R. Delany