Waste Land and Other Poems

“Only a genius could write a book called The Waste Land and Other Poems. Well, John Beer is that person. I set out to write a treatise on failure, and it turned out my subject was love, he writes. Call it my confusion. We should all be so confused.”
- John Ashbery

“The Waste Land and Other Poems may or may not be the most important book of American poetry in the last eighty-eight years, but when the next eighty-eight years are up, I give it a good shot to be the most important first book in American poetry since Some Trees. I've been right a number of times before, even if no one seems to be listening. Sometimes lightning strikes a church tower and the whole town catches fire.”
- Kent Johnson

“Am trying in a handful of sentences to write a blurb for John Beer's The Wasteland and Other Poems - something that will describe the newness of the work and something that will praise the invention of it. Have been halfway tempted to simply steal a snippet from someone else's jacket and tailor it to suit J.B. If only it were that easy! Anything I find on the rack is too small. John Beer is a poet of big shoulders. You should have a feel for yourself.”
- D. A. Powell
“John Beer’s long overdue first book is a perfect mirror of a world that has borrowed more than it can ever repay. He embraces and distills 'the bad dream' and all 'the muck' of the recent past, but the momentum of this book is full speed ahead. Unflinching, unrepentant, soulful, brilliantly imagined and with eyes wide open, he is the poet of onwardness for the next century. If ever a book lives up to its title, this one does.”
- Lewis Warsh