No Grave Can Hold My Body Down, Ahsahta Press, 2011

“Aaron McCollough’s No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is a bravura experiment in matching literary modernism with the canon of traditional American musics contained in the subtly syncretistic guitar music of the late John Fahey. McCollough aspires to “walk worthy / between the vespers of history,’ and this book is an elaborate preparation for speaking of the relations between World and Wilderness. I admire McCollough’s strategies for marshalling temporally disparate, dissident voices, and for imagining the experience of the newly risen dead.” —David Grubbs

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Little Ease, Ahsahta Press, 2006

“In these poems, there’s what hovers around the ear and how that is or isn’t the self. They remind me of my upper and lower limits, and how song’s limits relate to what’s around. How to sound out domesticity, singularity, the nation? Each a freedom or a prison-house (‘little ease’ there), but the song skillfully binds them and releases them by ‘plant[ing] it round with//…sweet Lyric Song.’” —Eleni Sikelianos

“Aaron McCollough’s heartbreaking Little Ease is stunning in its ability to get at collective—yea, national as well—sins through its cries and meditations on a single soul’s struggles toward ‘nothing but holy, pure, and cleare’ (Herbert). The 4 x 4 cell in the Tower of London, Little Ease is of the self’s own making, from fear (‘. . .to work / at / deeds / for sake of deeds / [that] seek repose and rest. . .’), and the victimizer is the victim of her own sins, finding no ‘rest in restlessness.’ The poet takes his palette from the social and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the grip of a ‘personal God’ began to tighten. Aaron McCollough is a poet of prodigious powers, able to take the full of his poetic inheritance and to make essential poetry at the center of our own ferocious gyre.” —Susan Wheeler

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Double Venus , Salt Publishing, 2003

“Aaron McCollough knows that America and Thanatos are hiding something. His poetry uses all manner of devices, determined to find out what and where it is among concrete things and living creatures with their riotous emblems. And sings when a song is called for.”—Alan Halsey

“In Double Venus, Aaron McCollough fulfills a promise with a continuity, completes an errand with a deeper errand. Here is the Crashaw of us, crowned in jessamine. Here is a metaphysics we can use, now and in all the hap ahead.” —Donald Revell

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Welkin, Ahsahta Press, 2002

“Aaron McCollough has reclaimed (that is, radically reclaimed) a certain ancientness of praise and quest, credence and address, for our fractured present. The resulting poems resonate with a singular music, urgency, and substance.”—Michael Palmer

“McCollough’s Welkin, a revival of those energies which flow between the gorgeous happenstance of Earth and the serene mandates of Heaven. These are poems of a powerfully expressed vertu. These are flowers that know the secrets of their names.” —Donald Revell

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