"THE STING OF IT is cradled in classical form and bubbles with luscious language from a bygone era. Fans of Spenser and Donne will find comfort here. But this formal order only just restrains the chaos from Odasso's own body and past. Their explosive and candid revelations make us aware of our beautiful, mortal grit. Odasso's ferocious imagery within measured verse reminds us that life is mysterious, painful, and fantastic." —Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country "Odasso writes in one poem: 'Your edifice shudders.' They could be talking metaphor, science, magic, politics, or all four. That is the way of Odasso's poems: they begin in one key and suddenly you are hearing music far from New York or Oz, both recognizable places, and instead you have been flung into the poetry of a writer who eschews easy borders, and leaps genres in a single bound to create poems that truly matter. Besides, how can you not love a poem that ends: 'what is a wound / but a door through which / blood leaves'?" —Jane Yolen, New York Times bestselling author "AJ Odasso's is a haunted music, death and life-haunted, lover-haunted, but always beauty haunted. I love the way the poems sound, and look, in their careful forms. As I read, and then afterwards, Odasso's language 'sunk thorn-sharp in my marrow.'" —Steven Ostrowski, author, with Ben Ostrowski, of Penultimate Human Constellations