Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Filled with the unpredictable details that fill city life, Reiss’ poems carry the reader along, like fellow passengers in the express subway car, traveling through familiar (sometimes not so friendly) locales while following the poet’s train of throught.... Whatever slice of life he chooses, Reiss’s typical American experiences come through-fresh, affectionately direct, touchingly true. (Booklist)

Throughout this exemplary collection, the actual is perceived in all its four dimensions: the three that are described by the physical world, and the fourth which lies just behind and is described only by the noumenal eye.... Even a casual conversational style does not come without hard labor. In these poems, the labor is of course invisible to us. We have only these jazzy lines: poems that are enjoyable and, in several instances, significant. (Frederick Smock American Book Review)

Although these poems do not make grand pronouncements they have as their source what Howard Nemerov called ‘great primary human drama,’ and they are always interesting and often moving. (Peter Meinke The New Republic)

In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence. (Helen Vendler The New York Times Book Review)

This book contains poems from Reiss's first four books, plus rollicking new work from his fifth volume, Slap Me Five, and his sixth collection of laugh-outloud rhyming satirical war verse, A Child's Garden of Evil. As one reviewer said, this book "will command a wide audience."