Poetry Northwest recently reviewed G.C. Waldrep's Testament, offering an in-depth analysis of the book-length poem, and calling it "a truly major poetic achievement."

Reviewer R.M. Haines praises Waldrep's ability to drive against the stereotypical idea of a testament through his inclusion of "rhetorical discontinuity, protean lexical range, relentless associative leaps, and daringly abstract aphorism." Haines describes the work as a stroke of "genius." In the book-length poem, Waldrep takes themes such as religion, race, and personal life experiences, and leaves them open-ended enough to for readers to "discover a new idiom of extraordinary freedom, dexterity, and scope" within his words.

The review concludes: "Ultimately, Waldrep’s poem seeks a way in which to morally imagine and inhabit our dependence upon other bodies, and its discovery—its revelation and testament—is that one’s poem must in turn be inhabited and imagined by this dependency. Thus, the poem repeatedly opens itself up, vents, releases, incurs more and varied content, and bears the marks of it all: the seams are everywhere; it is a poem of seams. The poem acts as an endless receipt of things heard, taken in, mistaken, distorted, fought, and believed in. . . . In its utterly singular way, regardless of the dissonance it incurs along the way, Testament effects this reciprocity between the world within the poem and the poem within the world. Waldrep has given something wonderful: a poem whose testament can be trusted because it allows us to doubt."

Click Here to read the entire Poetry Northwest review.

Testament is available now at the BOA Bookstore.