“Lease pares back the flesh of his verse until all that remains are the ethereal and essential bones."
—Arkansas International
“[Lease’s] lyricism is strong, stubborn, and won’t be diluted."
—Galatea Resurrects
“[A] mystical, transportational, and reconfiguring text.”
—Interim
“[E]lectric and electrifying, spontaneous and illuminating.”
—Tablet
“This is a vision as palpable as the ghost body of our neoliberal society evanescing before us.”
—John Keene
“Lease is a tour de force master of prosody, of the subtle music of words evoking, in this case, passionate feelings of caring, of grief, of sorrow for this broken world. These poems are unique; nothing I have read is like them.”
—Norman Fischer
“Joseph Lease’s is a singularly moving and devastatingly beautiful voice in contemporary poetry. The haunting iterations and luminous specificity of his powerful new collection The Body Ghost channel the sadness, rage, and desire of this fraught historical moment in a vibrant minor key.”
—Trace Peterson
“[Lease] is the future of poetry.”
—David Shapiro
“These incantatory poems are capacious and revelatory, allowing space for grief, for healing, and perhaps for an elegy to the music of poetry where ‘sound gives life—.'”
—Jennifer Firestone
“A spectral fan dance or a poetic striptease of sorts—its haunted, incremental engines, lavish white spaces, and agile floating lines (like tracks in amassed snow sometimes), its neo-Dickinson dashes leading the entranced reader toward revelatory clues, needling truths, and insistent joys.”
—Cyrus Cassells
