The first thing to occur to me upon reading All the Tricks of Language is wanting to go back and read each poem again, and again, and again, because it felt so good. The words clicked into place like the gears of a clock, sonic subtleties combined with the vivid, tactile imagery of a theatrum mundi. This is the work of a seasoned poet, with a bit of the bricklayer in him. Phanopoeia spread with a trowel. Flashes of linguistic splendor, tastefully muted by an overarching sense of decorum, illumine particularities of truth, the manifest beauty of things in themselves 'tricked into breathing.' -John OlsonAll The Tricks of Language-that title glitters, disappears into itself, and ushers in a wild and meticulous poetics of forward motion. Vincenz is a dancemaster who understands that we exist against terrific odds. There's a chord of tears and laughter, an intimate knowledge of our vulnerability: 'the sinful and awkward under the lion's gaze'.

The architecture of this book is vertiginous. Background becomes foreground, foreground is open to the night sky. Vincenz has a dazzling wit and a great eye for the contingent, the perishable, the hue of a damselfly's eye. All The Tricks Of Language is a book like no other-a bravura tour de force, a sui generis structure, a volley of arrows shot into the unknown. -D. NurkseMarc Vincenz has done it again! In All the Tricks of Language, he gives his readers a hybrid wonder. A play starring Denise Levertov and Sylvia Plath and Pessoa and John Donne. A lyric suite.

A pastiche. An epic complete with a descent into the Underworld. A prayer for all the sentient beings on this planet. An ode to our pipes and man made marvels. All the Tricks of Language is a remarkable feat from an assiduous wordsmith who builds a world like no other. -Denise DuhamelMarc Vincenz's All the Tricks of Language conjures a panoply of sentient beings, including-yet not excluding-the Norse god Freyr, Fernando Pessoa, and torpor trapped beneath fish scales. These poems journey across space and time, through and under plants and planets, and into variations of life forms. Concurrently, the poems sing to beloved ghosts and dreamers, and, extraordinarily, the poet collects the echoes of these ghosts, offering them, too, to us.

Such magical worlds materialize through the curtain of the poet's material, which is language, due to his sheer virtuosity. -Martine Bellen.