“The winsome, intellectually probing poems in Blau’s debut collection examine lived experience through the lens of myth, memory and rigorous philosophical inquiry, with one eye on the instant when, ‘at this moment’s close, you’ll cross the border / into the moment after. … Your shadow’s growing shorter.’”
“peep is a tour de force, and it’s more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it’s imaginative and bold; but it’s also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic....
Though her flexible diction is present-day, though she has a gender-specific savviness and élan that probably wouldn’t have been possible before the advent of the twenty-first century (or thereabouts), though she’s street-wise, nothing in her work is just contemporary, nothing is independent of anything else. As hip as she is, she’s also a throwback to the Romantic vocation of organic form. All her effects are emanations of the fullness with which her sensibility inhabits language and the confident way her imagination takes possession of her experience.”
—Vijay Seshadri, from his foreword to peep
“Danielle Blau obsessively plays with language until she hits something wondrous and strange. Her debut volume, peep, is jaunty and deft, utterly fresh, formally innovative, but it is also filled with secret hurts and sorrows. It has philosophical depths. Buoyant and brimming with linguistic maneuvers, it is ultimately a work of soul-making.”
—Edward Hirsch
“Danielle Blau’s peep cannot be read swiftly. There isn’t verbal-sleight-of-hand in this verse, yet peep challenges a reader to grasp rhythm in form, to internalize meaning and the joy in language. Urban yet measured, these poems demand an active reader who grows into each journey.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa
CARNEGIE HALL, Weill Recital Hall
Blau's poem "A Suicide Bomber (Twelve Seconds To Go) Beholds the Teeming Marketplace and Foresees His Death" was originally published in Narrative Magazine as “The Suicide Bomber's Song, Minutes Before”.
“[David Cieri and Danielle Blau] present challenging minimalist music with poetry... [that is] interesting and intense... [and] that draws you in with a welcome focus.”
Jeffrey James, SoundWordSight Magazine review of Carnegie Hall performance
Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, NY — clips of Blau reading "The Fear" (full poem in The Saint Ann’s Review).
Blau's "How Long Now Since the Mailman's Gone Missing?" originally appeared in The Baffler.
Blau's poem "Arpeggio Progression in Missing Key" can be read here in Narrative Magazine.
“‘The Vernal Equinox Story’ is a brilliant time-traveling language poem by American poet Danielle Blau. The poem’s experimental heft and wildly imaginative ecocritical wit drive the poem home to a bodily coda (‘we silt – we water & sand – we muck – we here – we filth – we / Matter. Yes. Behold!/ our forms!’). A marvelous collective incantatory voice informs this poem of vibrant matter. But the chant suggests that humans may not matter very much at all! If matter can be read backwards and forwards, so too can language, as with the palindrome. The poem and its palindromes evoke archaic superstitious language, but also a threatening absurdity, for the palindrome tribe belong nowhere. Blau’s parodic language cleverly places words, humans, and time under pressure.”
—A. Frances Johnson, speaking on behalf of the judges (John Hawke, Lachlan Brown, A. Frances Johnson, and John Kinsella) at the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize awards ceremony
(Blau’s shortlisted poem can be found in Australian Book Review.)
“Blau can take any object and make it intriguing, even magical, with her unwavering attention and lyrical way of hearing and seeing.”
—David McLendon, founding editor of Unsaid Magazine
This recorded reading appears alongside Blau’s poem in the June 2020 issue of Plume Poetry.
“Danielle Blau's mere eye is a collection of collapsed time, filtered light and compiled images writ against the formless void in cinematic sequencing which foregrounds the presence of the artistic mind. Blau imprints the investigative act of composition with stylistic flourishes.... The effect of this elaborately expressive mode of aestheticism is to remind us how much the raw power of imagination gives shape to poetry.... Blau's work is, like Coleridge's, capricious.... Grief, love, joy and utter wildness permeate every line. Underneath the style throbs a human heart.... This is not merely art in the service of art. It is art in service of compassion. It is life writ large.”
—D.A. Powell, from his introduction to mere eye
“[Danielle Blau's short story] 'Growth' is so lush and elegant as to boggle the mind.”
—Roxane Gay
“[Danielle Blau's] world is also our world, with all our modern concerns. Her poems are not escapes into the past or into the cobwebby interiors of language, and it is this that excites me most about her poems—the way she reminds us that to inhabit the imagination is to fully engage with the world. And that what's flat and dreary and wrong about our culture is its refusal and inability to live imaginatively like this, like these poems do. Danielle takes up Shelley's call for a powerful, activist imagination, as when he says, 'A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others.' It is through lack of this that our culture is dreary, and it is because of this that Danielle's poems are exciting.”
—Matthew Rohrer