"Brutalism is often remembered as a top-down type of building that no one ever wanted in the first place, but it was always more complicated than that. Toby Altman's Discipline Park untangles and re-tangles Brutalism's complications by digging into all that has been pushed into and projected on the surface of one particular building in Chicago. The imbrications between institutions and individuals…Sometimes it’s easiest to see things when they’re coming apart."
—Alex Kitnick

"Toby Altman’s Discipline Park brings autobiography, architectural theory, civic history, and an unsettled critique of whiteness to task as it tests the notion that human life is 'a traveling wound, which inflicts itself on the landscape.' Do we take the shape of our environment, or do we shape it? When and how can this chain of relation end? I am struck by the piercingly distilled lines that pepper these pages like throwaway remarks, where another poet might have been satisfied to relish them. Instead, we are led to a halting closing essay that places its extended and difficult composition in plain sight. Discipline Park traces not so much a short, sharp cut but a distributed wound—a long, rough scrape that hurts in the foreground, sensitizes the border between self and world, and tests the integrity of surface itself."
—Anna Moschovakis

"A poetry packed into tight rectangles and corridors that intersect and enjamb across pages, Discipline Park embraces the pillars and steel of the institutional structures meant not only to house us at our most vulnerable moments but also to serve as facilities to research and study us. It is a fascinating subject when handled so skillfully and with such profound understanding of how we are shaped by the places built to administer care when we are most vulnerable."
—DA Powell