"Gabriel Kruis is a really formidable poet. Acid Virga is rather
terrifying, also a tour de force and a formal breakthrough. . . a blend
of narrative and lyric the way the mind is. . . " --ALICE NOTLEY
"As wildly visionary as it is linguistically alive, Gabriel Kruis's
Acid Virga drills down into the bedrock of American life to produce a
book unparalleled in its exploration of how visionary experience and
social upheaval collide in ways that are both transformative and
annihilating." --TOM SLEIGH
"If you've ever been conscious, and felt a little disturbed about it, of
life as ancient and ephemeral or that falling apart is an integral
force, this is a book to read over and over." --STACY SZYMASZEK
". . .a great affliction and affection inform Acid Virga, fast-moving
with strophes like brisk moving cloud banks over the mind in your
heart." --MAJOR JACKSON
"Meanwhile,
in el mal pais,
leaned out on mucinex,
mixing dexy cocktails
in the haloed pharmacy
of the car..."
An unusually assured debut, Acid Virga is a memoir in verse cutting
between a vivid Southwest upbringing and modern O'Hara hustle in New
York City, deeply and seriously reckoning with the psychedelic heritage
of religion and the psychological clarity of chemical consciousness. It
is both thrillingly propulsive and dense enough to read again and again,
always offering up something new. Language is boundlessly specific,
evocative of states internal and external, reading at times like a
melancholy memoir stuck between stations, an epic poem or even a
philosophical tract, always a true and important record of our American
lives as lived now--an endless and reliable ticker tape of the soul.
