“Although Ephraim Scott Sommers’ smart, terrifying poems deny the safety of arrival, they remain in their rejection of closure stubbornly, improbably hopeful. Not for redemption or peace of mind—these anxious poems know better than to hope for the impossible—but for purposeful action after so much shame and wild mischance. The work of a lifetime, converting sorrow into something of use, a song for the hard journey ahead.”
—Dorothy Barresi
“Ephraim Scott Sommers is a poet of the people: he knows humankind’s cruelties and knows he too is capable of such evil. This is why The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire is such a brilliantly dangerous debut. Sommers openly and artfully names the men, women, and children who have come together to shape the life of his mind. And his mind is indeed alive with poems of tremendous leaps and charged rhythms. This is a collection of homages and odes meant to remind us how glorious we are in all our ordinary ways. Ephraim Scott Sommers has written a book you should read to yourself and then read aloud to someone you love.”
—Jericho Brown
“The art of wrecking the mundane is everywhere on these pages where we are woken up from our days by Sommers’ tonal fireworks, by the oceanic sweep of his longish poems, by the human voice that speaks against death, standing up, full strength. And what a poet he is!—playful, innovative, earnest, hilarious, wildly alive, with so much verve and love of life, so much building of pianos “just to watch” us push them off the pier! Game is on, ladies and gentlemen. This is your chance to see a talented poet embrace the Whitman inside him and go “on the nerve” as Frank O’Hara told us a poet must. This is a splendid first book.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
