“People with advanced aggressive cancers automatically become authorities on mortality. Poets with such cancers have been dealt, at great cost, four aces. And for the wild ones, like Jay Hopler, cancer can be a field day. The bleak friskiness here is not new, nor is the swaggering rancor (like Berryman, who was also proud to be right in his dire predictions). What is new is gratitude: for the ‘atomic girl’ it is his extraordinary good fortune to meet and ultimately marry; for the opportunity of art, which lends to his passions’ duration. There is a difference, marked in these poems, between rage at the fact of mortality and rage at the diagnosis of its imminence. And the latter infuses Hopler’s extravagant jokes and glittering improvisations with the urgency and weight of last words.”
—Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Still Life is astonishing, a collection that faces up to the injustice of untimely death and discovers—not insulated from despair and rage but arrived at somehow *through* them—an extraordinary, difficult, electric joy. No book I have read in years has moved me so deeply; no book has felt so full of life.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You