Longlisted for the 2019 Believer Book Award in Poetry
“McDaniel renders each poem’s discoveries with a worthwhile particularity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Cataracts is a book of blurred vision, a theme imbued into the spaces between the lines, into the memories of the narrator—memories that feel like a game.”
—The Millions
“[The Cataracts] never gives up hope that we might find answers to the existential questions that it simultaneously believes unanswerable. And with McDaniel’s keen insight, we just might.”
—Arkansas International
“Each poem combines philosophy and poetic tools to deconstruct landscapes into multiple images, and then rearranges those images into something entirely new, as if engaging metaphysics to create revelations.”
—New York Journal of Books
“McDaniel is a master of wordplay.”
—Galatea Resurrects
“McDaniel is an astute, generous poet of human stupidity and longing, and his is a mature, ramifying sensibility, alive to the profound tension between the many and the one, the pressure of multitudes and the requirement to declare oneself. These poems both name the wounds and refuse easy balm.”
—Maureen McLane
“Make no mistake: this is narrative-with-leverage; the poet’s dazzling mind-play is perfectly intact. From its ravishing title poem to its most excoriating political critiques, this is a book for which I am profoundly grateful.”
—Linda Gregerson
“McDaniel mines the ways in which we shape visual and written narratives to obscure the meanings we find morally inconvenient or intellectually uncomfortable. The questions that haunt this wonderful book will draw readers continually—and gratefully—back into The Cataracts’ pages.”
—Paisley Rekdal
