"Subversive Sonnets is an astonishing achievement. Beautifully gloved in the materiality of everyday things and not-always everyday places, these poems yet push the reader towards speculative realms of gold, where real places also become mind places andhomes of deep feeling. Mordecai readily takes us from the finely personal to wider grief for North America#146;s, the Caribbean#146;s, and all our sins, from the saucily bawdy to political fury and horror at a New World turned bitterly, bitingly old, or from a joyous bounce to subsequent personal loss and collective agony that can become skin-crawlingly terrifying. These sonnets are the achievement of years of a poet#146;s wisdom." --TIMOTHY J REISS Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, New York University "Subversive Sonnets is sweet, acerbic, scintillating, and sassy. If you want to be right, you can't go wrong in reading these verses that modernize the sonnet, putting it in service of mischief, not only meditation. Mordecai has assembled a collection that is arrogant in its dazzle and provocative in its sizzle. Here's the real poetry, folks: thought given discipline and then set free to sing and/or singe.

" --GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature, University of Toronto.