CORRIE WILLIAMSON:

“Jory Mickelson deftly and powerfully probes one of the great American myths through breathtaking poem after breathtaking poem. Mickelson’s daring reckoning with the idea of The West (its plundered opening, its brutal hunger and astonishing beauty) is balanced by their deep empathy and eye for complexity, pleasure, and detail. The history of loss / sets up a people to either forget / or hold on forever, Mickelson writes, and these poems are both prayer and commentary on the horror and holiness of that history and its modern echoes. This is a necessary work of unsorrowing and unforgetting that is utterly gorgeous to read, alive with music, buoyed by skillful research and rendering, and ultimately brimming with mercy, hope, and light. I am awed by these poems.”

JOE WILKINS:

All This Divide is both a reckoning—with the myths and violences of westward expansion, with the beautiful and ravaged landscapes of the American West, with the soul and soul’s ache for holiness—as well as an intimate, lyrical exploration of what remains of Stegner’s geography of hope, which includes, in Mickelson’s queer retelling, the hungering heart and the body of the beloved. I haven’t read a book as simultaneously fierce and lovely in a long, long time.

C DALE YOUNG:

“The hard line of horizon draws the eye, always forward, writes Jory Mickelson as he guides us in this richly-drawn pastoral of the American West. Like Whitman, Mickelson celebrates the natural world in great detail both in its landscapes and in the people who inhabit them. All This Divide is a beautiful and sensual collection that takes as it purpose …to make every image true, or at least true enough to last.”

JANE WONG:

“Jory Mickelson’s All This Divide circumambulates through time, excavating the violent layers of lineage: Our story / one dark furrow. Mickelson’s images are sharp and evocative, imaginative and felt: The swallows— // they are combing the clouds’ trailing hair and the knotted // hawk you are / pulling from my throat. Lyrical and sonically curious, these poems press their ears against the hearts of many storytellers. All This Divide asks us to consider our connectedness, one beetle and one stone at a time.”