Like his bravura tightrope walker in “The Great Wallenda,” Boxer “minds each [word],” “indulges no illusions,” and “throbs with the thrill” of his vistas. These poems continually delight the reader with their skill and daring.

Like the Great Wallenda poised upon a tightrope above the gnashing, slavering jaws of Niagara Falls, Asa Boxer’s sharply crafted poems consistently draw the living into deep focus. His edge-of-chasm calmness and his way of softly imploding the human experiment – vicious yet tender – results in poetry that swallows its own barely contained mythologies. The weight of witness drenches Boxer’s writing – nostalgic, Shakespearian, zombie apocalyptic – with the wisdom of the walking dead. The poems in The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle will worm into your inward most searches and set up camp. Deliciously insidious.

In The Narrow Cabinet Asa Boxer expertly interweaves high satire and refined wit with base passions and brute force. This is a book which powerfully demonstrates Boxer’s absolute and beauteous synthesis of all the elements of poetry while at the same time making important commentary on our times. Asa Boxer is one of the best poets writing in the English language. The Narrow Cabinet is essential reading.

Boxer delights in the creative powers of language: he infuses life into every object, he explodes and implodes those objects, he creates alternate histories and secret lives for them, he imbues them. – Arc Poetry Magazine

“The Workshop” vividly brings to life the sights, sounds and smells of a craftsman’s private space. – Richardson’s Roundup, CBC

The Mechanical Bird has a density, an eloquence, an originality of conception and execution that strike me as exceptional. These are poems with the heft and solidity of lathed and hammered objects; they shine in their black oil. – Eric Ormsby