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“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.’”

—The New York Times Book Review

“To venture into Danielle Blau’s peep… is to embark on a complicated ride, or, as the saying now goes, an immersive experience: varied in texture and pace, full of unexpected twists and turns, always intense. Or reading peep resembles a visit to a museum whose every gallery offers not only a different exhibit but a distinct atmosphere and mood….

The animating spirit throughout is one of distilled complexity. The constant pulsation of Blau’s poetic energy means that the pauses are pleasurable but also suspenseful: where will the poet’s restless intelligence lead us next?…

peep sometimes feels like more than one book: so many surprises, so many voices, are packed in. You get the sense that the mind of the maker is always spinning ahead, that it takes an effort for her to stand still. Such moments of stasis come to feel like respite, all the more rewarding because we know they won’t last. Isn’t that how the mind works, spinning backwards, pausing on a memory, putting pieces of experience into an order it then swiftly dismantles en route to the next discovery? I don’t always follow Blau’s twists and turns; I can’t always keep up with her headlong pace. But I’m never less than confident that she knows exactly what she’s doing: the dives and plunges, the explorations and lamentations, the overheard dialogue and the child’s plaintive presence all testify to the poet-philosopher, whose forthcoming study, Rhyme or Reason: Poets and Philosophers on the Problem of Being Here Now (Norton), promises to provide a rich and varied feast.”

—Rachel Hadas, from “An Awful Order”: On Danielle Blau’s “peep”, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The poem that opens Blau’s ruminative debut is a knockout, riffing on palindromes to burst forth like a vernal pond in spring: ‘as Sun,/ uncaging coiled ribs, exhaled pure/ vitriolage of Spring/ &—once more/ newly heaven-/ bent on ravishment, & scour, & scraping/ clean without// distinction—down-/ lusted blind translucence towards us.’… Insinuated trauma, a disappearing father, and a mother who doles out canned peas for magic pills intersect, making these pages like a fractured fairy tale.”

—Publishers Weekly

“In her debut collection, Danielle Blau gives me a glimpse—a peep—at the emptiness at the center of all things. The emptiness within and the emptiness without. And she makes the view beautiful, though no less unsettling, even terrifying. The book is called peep, and if you hear slang for ‘friend,’ you hear—and see in those lowercases—something of the style of the poems, wise but not academic, free but piercing, formal but artfully fickle about it. And if you’re the sort of reader who notices that ‘peep’ is a palindrome, you’ve got another way into these poems, poems that make a ritual out of structure, a solidity out of the meaningful meaninglessness of numerology…. The palindrome, in this context, becomes not only a figure for the formal imagination at work here, but also for Blau’s obsession with the emptiness—the ‘hole’ in the ‘mirror’ that is also, sometimes, unexpectedly, a ‘seed,’ a placeholder for possibility….

[In] these virtuosic poems—there’s a villanelle, a poem that goes in and out of strong, chiming couplets, persona poems and couplets and blocks of prose—the engagement with emptiness is not only linguistic but emotional…. What, the allegory asks, can be seen? And what is a friend? What is a daughter, and what is a mother? Is ‘lost’ the only real condition any of us ever inhabits? The poems answer by calling to—and into—the very abyss they see.”

—Jesse Nathan, from Short Conversations with Poets: Danielle Blau, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

“With satisfying music and sophisticated irony, Blau exposes the universal tics of existence….There are optical illusions, false reflections, and holes that aren’t holes throughout these portal poems. The deeper we travel inward the more room for emptiness we find, emptiness or a peephole through which we might commune with a world beyond us. When humor leads to the human, the balance strikes just right: “singing she / leans in for a kiss and I see // there’s a hole in her face where / her face should be…”

… If a peep is a small sound or a quick look, these poems offer entries and ledges from which we can witness our own internal worlds. Blau frequently addresses a “you,” breaking the fourth wall: “Follow me. I’m right // here. I’m that / dot over there on your screen. // No, over there.” Our gaze becomes part of the play. The reader becomes self-aware, implicated, a voyeur. And it is not just that we are the audience but that we perform the audience as in a peepshow, thinking we are safe in our boxes while witnessing the enticing, terrifying, and erotic….

Blau’s poetics is as radical as it is entertaining, as charged with the unknown as it riddled with the quest to know…. Here is a voice that is hungry for evidence of its own existence. The reader, rather than merge with the speaker, must stay a bit apart, off-stage, backstage, at times pulling the curtain strings ourselves: “Although if you’re like me — Are / you like me? Please like me…” With this invitation to participate and enjoy the speaker’s company, Blau offers the reader more attention and power than many collections, let alone debuts, do. Entering Blau’s consciousness, we end up one step deeper into our own multiple, irrational, infinite, and unknowable selves.”

—Elizabeth Metzger, from Palindrome as Portal, Existence as Performance: On Danielle Blau’s “peep”, Los Angeles Review of Books

“We expect great things from winners of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Danielle Blau’s peep—also named to Lambda Literary’s Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature list, another bellwether of high-quality books—meets and exceeds those expectations. Blau is a trained philosopher, but these poems are not abstract, tidy thought-puzzles. In peep, Blau uses palindromes as a tenet of poetic structure and even meaning, returning to the titular palindrome in the collection’s penultimate stanza and suggesting that the volume itself is a poem.

The book’s palindromic structure demands that each poem be read forwards and backwards. The best poems send us from the last line back to the first in search of a reflective structure, or a kind of volta or turn in the middle—an end that is a beginning. Blau’s poems almost seem recondite by design. Like a game of three-card monte, their simple setup tempts us to peep beneath the sleight of hand—and when we do look, the hidden card’s location bewilders us.”

—Josh Brewer, from his review of peep in Harvard Review online

“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