About A Communion of Saints:

 

"As the editor of two journals primarily dedicated to formal and metrical poetry, it is unusual for me to read a set of poems and feel that I am in the presence of that rare bird, a poet who not only understands the proper mechanics of meter and form , but who can use them to produce great poetry. Terry Culleton is such a poet. . . . Culleton gives free rein to his lively imagination and mischievous sense of humor, but although the poems are often wildly funny, they usually serve to elucidate some nugget of philosophy or spiritual angst, and many resonate with an almost unearthly beauty. . . . I am sure we will be seeing much more of his work in both local and national venues."

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                                                                    -- Anna Evans, editor of Barefoot Muse and The Raintown Review and author of The                                                                              Unacknowledges Legislator and Under Dark Waters: The Sinking of The Titanic 

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"For years I have applauded Terry Culleton’s hilarious accounts of fictitious saints he has brought into existence through his abundant imagination.  But despite his glibness in telling about "St. Apneus the Sleeper" who, on finding God “inaccessible to prayer,” vowed to “sleep his life away," or about St. Anorexius who subsists on his miserly diet (“a dot of cottage cheese, a molecule of milk, a nice afterthought of Cantonese Duck or Thousand-Year-Old Egg”), his seriousness of purpose is never in doubt. Reading Culleton’s poems I am struck by the awe and reverence he extends to his solitary seekers in their quest for the divine.  Their self-doubt and self-deprivation—their willingness to give their lives up to something greater than themselves—resonates during these secular times of texting and instant messages, when religious devotion seems quaint and peculiar and out of fashion." 

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                                                                   -- Joe Chelius, author  of Crossing State Lines and The Art of Acquiescence.

 

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About A Tree and Gone (forthcoming from Future Cycle Press):

 

"[Culleton's]poems are rife with motion, often of waves and of winds, but also of a bird dropping that lands on a leaf of chickweed or of a dog that we see “pitch and zag / in wafts and skirls of blindingly bright snow.” That motility might seem at odds with such a traditional form as the sonnet, but there’s a blessed rage for order here, and the artifice is often pressured by the changes that these poems document. [T]he skillful control is reminiscent of Richard Wilbur."

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                                                                   -- Temple Cone, author of Guzzle, The Broken Meadow, and No Loneliness.

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