Yakich's irreverent style, conversational tone, and quirky illustrations make for a guide that will be both instructive and entertaining for anyone interested in learning more about reading and writing poetry.

Publishers Weekly

Surviving the "poetry bug" isn't always easy and can sometimes feel very lonely. But, Yakich's (English, Loyola Univ. New Orleans; A Meaning for Wife) handy guide could be the help lonely and not-so-lonely poets need. It presses tenets, techniques, and propositions about poetry in a gentle and reassuring way. Filled with clear examples and helpful tips, ostensibly this is a book for people who are interested in the making of poetry, but that could be writers as much as readers. ...Yakich is never pedantic or overly intellectual, writing instead in an informal voice that tends to feel more like a friendly discussion at the watercooler than a college lecture. ...[It] is cheerfully written and kindly meant.

Library Journal

Mark Yakich's Poetry: A Survivor's Guide is more than a guide, it's a heart's hornbook for all of us who occasionally look at a poem and see nothing but alphabet soup. Ranging freely from topics like “Culture Jamming” to “Ineffability” to “Procrastination,” Yakich brings us closer to the mysteries of art in entries of dazzling intimacy and intelligence. You will find cartoons here, and logos, and recipes, and illusions-and then, when you put down Poetry: A Survivor's Guide and pick up a poem to read, you'll find all those things there, too. If you're a poet, this book will remind you of the reasons why you fell in love with the art in the first place. If you're a reader falling in love with the art in the first place, it might just make you a poet.

Srikanth Reddy, Associate Professor of English, The University of Chicago, USA, and author of Voyager

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide is a brilliantly provocative, witty and illuminating book about poetry in its many guises. It is both an homage to poetry and a reveille for its reanimation. In a series of superb vignettes – everything from Reader's Block to Culture Jamming and Procrastination – Mark Yakich offers sage advice and in doing so, bursts the urban myths about poetry wide open. This book will turn on its head everything you have ever thought about poetry, it will empower and entertain you and, most importantly, it will change the way you think about poetry.

Cassandra Atherton, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Professional & Creative Writing, Deakin University, Australia

This is a funny, brash, sweet, in-your-face, humble, questioning, advice-dispensing, and utterly smart-as-hell book. Everything you ever wanted (or didn't know you wanted) to know about “surviving” the reading or writing of a poem, or being a poet, or maybe even what it feels like to be a poem is in this “guide.” With a light touch, Yakich fills these pages with stories, ruminations, and wisdom backed by years of reading, writing, and teaching poetry. His discussions of poems and poets range across time periods and aesthetics and he covers a wide-range of topics, with everything from heavy-hitters like image and metaphor to less frequent comers like spirituality and how not to fear literary critics. This book is indeed a guide, but not ultimately for how to “survive” poems so much as how to revel in them-not despite but because of their ambiguity, their strangeness, their lack of value (and the opposite), and for the chance they offer us to “play.” Dedicated to Yakich's students, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide is for anyone who continues, for whatever ineffable reasons, to travel with poems in our pockets.

Shara McCallum, Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry, Bucknell University, USA, and author of The Face of Water: New & Selected Poems

When we lose our connection to language, we lose our connection to ourselves. This book will teach you how to make sense of any poem. But, more importantly, how to make sense of the amazing and baffling world around us. Funny, inventive, perceptive, astute, accessible, affable, compassionate; Yakich is the perfect tour guide for a trip into, through, and around poetry. You will survive, and be stronger, more creative, and less alone after the adventure.

Priscila Uppal, Poet, Novelist, and Professor of English, York University, Canada