"A key imperative in Marjorie Welish’s superb new book, A Complex Sentence, is the task of ‘not writing the unsaid,’ which presumably would mean to write the sayable in the folds of a complex sentence that erases it. Literary spirit guides come along to help—Mallarmé, Baudelaire, James, Pound, and critics who read them. There may be a ghostly revision of Pound’s imagism, ‘a complex in an instant of time,’ but instead of le mot juste, we have le mot détourné, diverted as it enters into new semiotic fields and explodes. A Complex Sentence is, in addition, a meditation on the book—its materiality (pages, margins, indexes, parchment, epigraphs, sentences)—and its cultural role as a document."
—Michael Davidson
"Wrenching, obdurate music. There may be no known correspondences for Marjorie Welish’s mind. The poems neither describe nor situate but compose and construct. The procedures are odd but the materials quite embodied. . . . She’s a little bit scary."
—C.D. Wright
"For Welish, as with the Alice Notley of Descent of Alette, cordoned off words and phrases imply a poised and thoughtful consciousness, caught in the midst of intellective and amusing animations of things and thought."
—Publishers Weekly
