[This book] is an impressive and seminal body of original scholarship and highly recommended for academic library [and] Literary Studies in general, and Michael Heller supplemental studies lists in particular.

Midwest Book Review

In The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller, Burt Kimmelman and Jon Curley have assembled a formidable chorus of voices to sing a love song, one of undeniable substance.... Jon Curley, Burt Kimmelman and their contributors offer a compelling assessment of Michael Heller's importance as a poet, but also of poetry as a way of repairing a "defanged" aesthetic. It is a moving tribute to the man, and the mission.

American Book Review

Over the past half century, Michael Heller has quietly but emphatically established himself as one of the most masterful poets of a post-Objectivist tradition—indeed, as one of the most thoughtful, lyrical, and philosophically profound of contemporary American poets. In major works of memoir and criticism, he has sensitively unravelled the nomadic origins of cultural and personal identity; in his poems he has limned a glittering constellation of powerful and emotionally resonant meditations on what it means to be Jewish, what it means to be American, what it means to be human. The essays in Jon Curley and Burt Kimmelman’s comprehensive and well-edited collection are an excellent introduction and an essential companion to Heller’s poetic achievement.

Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University, author of The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky

Michael Heller’s work is richly deserving of the intricate seriousness with which it is read in the splendid essays gathered here. At last, one feels, the scale and ambition of his poetry are clearly announced, the claims of the ethical intelligence duly weighed. This volume affords a necessary and timely celebration.

Peter Nicholls, New York University, author of George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism