"With the poet, we wager that a God who answers to many names will accept all manner of supplication. But our prayers say something about us, do something in us, Beasley believes."
—Aarik Danielsen, Fare Forward

"In Prayershreds, Bruce Beasley approaches prayer with a postmodern sensibility, but without irony—a rare combination. Or the irony is disarmed in wonder, a wide-eyed wonder equally accustomed to postures of terror and pleasure, of ecstasy and dismay. [...] I have never read a book more richly concerned with language-in-prayer, with prayer-in-language. It speaks with ancient knowledge, and yet somehow its song is wholly new."
—G. C. Waldrep

"As a fan of Bruce Beasley’s earlier work, I am glad to see this volume of new verse in which he makes an even deeper dive into the nature of language. Like E. E. Cummings and James Joyce, Beasley is a poet of language, someone who loves words so deeply he can’t resist wrestling with them, sometimes syllable by syllable. Admitting that he often wanders 'off-trail, far into words,' he makes us see anew the language we use every day and too often take for granted."
—Kathleen Norris

"The intellectually prodigious poet Bruce Beasley is uncannily wired to perceive, fracture, and reshape the sonic cosmos of language, particularly the language of prayer (praise, thanksgiving, petition), with an acuity that is both feverish and reverent. One thinks of Hopkins on psilocybin, the Psalmist translating the Dhammapada. Our iconoclastic guide through this antic, homophone-driven, thesaural minefield of the discourse of belief and unbelief is as conversant with AI chatbots as with the Biblical gospels."
—Lisa Russ Spaar