"Lyn Hejinian’s books have always been characterized by their intellectual curiosity and openness. Each seems dedicated to a form of inventive continuity, an unsentimental affirmation of life’s 'irrational exuberance.' Tribunal is that — but it is also something different. It is, in some sense, about lived time (as are Hejinian’s other books) — but it is also very much of and even about this time, a time of 'tyrants extolling tyranny.' A new anger and urgency emerge in these poems. Here Hejinian’s 'rejection of closure' is counterbalanced by an impulse to call a halt. A tribunal, after all, sits in judgment. She pulls herself and her readers up short when she parodies one of her own best known lines: 'Now a pause, now a rose, and now a small coffin, Bitch!' Listen up. 'Attention: anarchy! (And its assistant: poetry!).' I, for one, am very glad there is still the poetry of Lyn Hejinian."
—Rae Armantrout, author of Wobble

"This is poetry that surrenders nothing but to poetry itself, and to poetry, that surrender is total. Music and intelligence are inextricably entwined in this book, as are wit and seriousness, experience and imagining. Reading and rereading it, I keep thinking that this is the kind of work that is the luxury required by necessity, that the beauties and complexities of the poems allow us to move past the forces that would reduce and diminish life."
—Anne Boyer, author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

"Organized as a three-part trial, the book articulates a timely political consciousness: one of war, fascism, and a 'not necessarily melancholy deactivation of will.'"
—Publishers Weekly