Reviews of Glean

"It's common to write that a poet's debut book is one of the best first books one has ever read. This volume, though, is simply one of the best books of poetry, first, second, or third, that I have ever read. With its intensity and whole-hearted commitment, verbal and emotional, and its dedication to a beauty no less genuine for its difficulty, this book particularly stands out in a contemporary American poetic landscape dominated by blank irony and pastiche."
— Reginald Shepherd, from Amazon

"Glean is a highly charged work, well worth the attention of anyone interested in watching language engage first questions. Kryah's investigations of kenosis and incarnation, of presence and absence, and his engagement with, not just the language of the Bible but also with the poetic tradition, repay the closest readings."
— Jason B. Jones, from Bookslut

"His poem’s share with Donne’s a sense of language as something physical, something to be felt, held in the mouth, savored and then released."
— Richard Jeffrey Newman, from The Great American Pinup

"What emerges from Glean's 'warehouse on fire' is the speaker who expects "honeycomb and locusts," but finds divine reviviscence in 'the senseless body floating among the waves' incantation' of Kryah's difficult, magnificent debut."
— Amanda Auchter, from Pebble Lake Review

"Ultimately, Kryah's voice is revealed as a clean, distinct, musical, perceptive, and empathetic instrument, and a reader couldn't ask for much more than that from a series of lyric poems, or from a lyric poet--especially one writing in the throes of the Age of Irony."
— Seth Abramson, from The Suburban Ecstasies

"If Glean exhibits the leavings, the nomadism of an original expulsion, it still ends up in the garden. Orpheus' lyre dissembles beautifully and, ultimately, usefully. In this impressive debut, Joshua Kryah instructs us of our religious and natural inheritances."
— Matthew Cooperman, from Pleiades 28:1