The Captain Lands in Paradise
by Sarah Manguso
Alice James Books, 2002
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Village Voice Book of the Year
Courier-Mail Book of the Year (Australia)
This book examines the moment just before reality happens. It opens with an excerpt from Columbus's ship's
log. Despite the evidence he hadn't landed in China, Columbus assumed he had. His belief overpowered what he saw,
and his irrational faith interested me.
Sarah Manguso
While "only trying to find my drink / and to communicate without lying," Manguso accomplishes a great
deal more.
Publishers Weekly
Sarah Manguso's The Captain Lands in Paradiseis possessed of a
rare and valuable quality: It's funny.
Rachel Hadas, Parnassus
Rarely does a first book resolve itself so assuredly to such a singly consistent and instructive
rhetoric.
Spencer Short, Boston Review
Sarah Manguso is an astonishingly good poet whose first
book was one of the best published in 2002.
Kevin Prufer, American Book Review
[This] impressive debut collection... announces an important arrival on the contemporary American
poetry scene.
Cindy King, Southeast Review
Quiet, whimsical... [Manguso] balances intellect and emotion in a way many poets strive for and few
achieve.
Susie Meserve, Rain Taxi
Sarah Manguso is a poet worthy of our attention, capable of the language of motion which stirs
thought and feeling.
Charlotte Mandel, Electronic Poetry Review
These poems are snazzy; they delight with their slaphappiness and in their yoking of the
skeptical and the surefooted.
Christine Hume, Constant Critic
Manguso's aesthetic generates interest... from the frisson of the improbable, and by befuddling our
minds' bureaucracies.
D. H. Tracy, Contemporary Poetry Review
Manguso is a forceful, imaginative poet with a strong sense of the classical and a fresh
innovative voice.
Angella Beshara, Pleiades
Manguso confronts the kinetic and transgressive energy of Eros; her poems are often initiated by
it.
Daniel Sumrall, Hyde Park Review
With an apocalyptic exuberance... The Captain Lands in Paradise
has an impact that belies its marvelously deft touch.
Dean Young
Sarah Manguso's poems strikingly frame what we re up against... hers is a startling, disturbing, and
original voice.
Carl Phillips
Manguso's swift and agile and often thunderous poems are a dance through the layers of the
disparate.
Mark Levine
