“Gail Wronsky has been at it for a long time. At what? Well, poetry, for one, but even before poetry, I imagine, a surrealist drive, by which I mean keeping tabs on death as filtered through an icy, blue-lipped, Kodacolor, apocalyptic, consciousness. Even her torrential proverbs are surreal, and her confessionalism hallucinates, with its memories of music boxes shaped like French cathedrals, its erotic marigolds. ‘Death ferments deep in the wrinkles of certain trench coats,’ she writes. It inhabits every space in these poems, the air that shrouds commas, the aperture that opens where the line breaks like a bone. Mockingbird’s Proverbs is, at its core, an act of mystic generosity. When mystics convey visions, it is holy instruction. It’s dowry, legacy. Be subversive, Wronsky’s poems tell us, while you still can. The imagination has always represented a defiance of the suburban lawn, a revolt against tyranny. Ask Lorca, a member of Wronsky’s lineage. Ask the mockingbird, with its downcast eye.” 

—Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry and frank: sonnets 

“Gail Wronsky has always been a formidable poet, one whose craft and beauty echoes so startlingly upon the page. With this new collection, she has gifted us with so much more. There is a depth to her speakers that we’ve never seen before, a knowing that we are led into without too much fanfare. The poet in this collection is an empowered one like never before; she wields her sharpened pencil like a knife upon the page, arming the reader against the woes of life, constantly giving us permission to dwell upon the darkness without getting lost in it. After all, ‘Light needs so much dark in order to dazzle.’ With Mockingbird’s Proverbs, we are able to get a glimpse into the eternities we are surrounded by; the poet goes out of her way to bestow on us instructions she has given herself too, instructions filled with immediacy and urgency, instructions that speak only the truth, and redeem us afterwards. ‘Sit here with me, in the/ time we have, so that eternity can love us.’ And indeed, we are loved, gathered, collected in this poet’s singular eye—and given permission to set ourselves free, no matter our circumstances.” 

 —Mahtem Shiferraw, author of Nomenclatures of Invisibility 

“A master of the lyric, a visionary never far from the complicated, wondrous relations between world and imagination, body and mind, Gail Wronsky is one of our most indispensable poets. Her Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New and Selected Poems brings together a body of work that is at once fierce, sensual and startling: ‘I lie like a sunbeam/amazed/at the edge of the page.’ The scale, the point of view Wronsky inhabits—part oracle, part brilliant best friend—is unlike any poetry I know. Anarchy, domesticity, death, love, and the delicate, almost unnoticed invisibilities of the quotidian reign, never far from revolution. An epigrammatic wisdom arrives by often standing on its head: an uncanny truth that is so second-guessed and interrogated one can’t help but trust in Muriel Ruykeyser’s prediction: ‘If a woman said the truth about her life, the world would split open.’ At last, as Etta James would sing it. As spiky and uncompromising as the work of Leonora Carrington, these poems carry a rare, mystical alchemy. And as Wronsky writes, ‘I am the woman filming it.’”

 —Gillian Conoley

“Any other poet with Gail Wronsky’s gift for sheer gorgeousness—for the sensuous image, for shapeliness, for the ever-unfolding ever-mobile vocal line—would call it a day. But Wronsky’s intellect is of a larger order:  restless, irreverent, wittily attuned to the force-fields of cultural fashion and to the depths those fashions bespeak.” 

—Linda Gregerson

“Gail Wronsky is in full control of her awesome (meant in the biblical/spiritual sense, of course) poetry, and although old Virgil lays the groundwork for these poems, there is an Ashbery-esque aspect to their profuse assertions and winding paths.”

—Pedestal Magazine