“The collection works in prose-poetic meditations and elegant aphorisms, weaving in contemporary culture, rounding out its absurdities and complexities with wry qualifications, historical particulars and unexpected reversals.”
—Hyperallergic
“There are few poets writing today with the range and talent of Bill Berkson.”
—Rain Taxi
“Insightful and inventive. . . . No aspect of life is off limits from the wit and skill of Berkson’s poetry and the world is better off for it.”
—AskMen.com
“Like his good friend Frank O’Hara, Bill Berkson writes about friends and family and isn’t afraid to drop a few glam names from life in the cities where he lives, in his case San Francisco and New York. Expect Delays is an all-too-familiar warning to urban Americans. In this case, the delays are as rewarding as the invigorating voyage.”
—John Ashbery
“Bill Berkson affords the pleasures of raucous refinement and epigrammatic élan in lyrics, translations, gleanings, and reflections. Expect Delays is recommended for libraries of every stripe and readers of every disposition: to all those who want their poetry dry and with a twist.”
—Charles Bernstein
“The simple and true conversion of everyday musings into the magnificence of eternal verities.”
—The Journal (South Carolina)
“[Expect Delays] combines difficult poetry with straightforward honesty rarely seen in contemporary poetry. Berkson’s strength is his versatility.”
—Cultural Weekly
“A masterwork created by a poet who has worked his hands writing and teaching poems of all stripes.”
—Atticus Reviews
