An irreverent airy confection, a buffet of zany set pieces, sometimes almost lightheaded with tongue-in-cheek humor, but punctured here and there by the pastry fork of real pathos. A rococo music-box, tinkling with outlandish rhymes and wordplay, but durably crafted, with secret sliding doors opening on chasms of devastating honesty. Blad fizzes with enthusiasm for all nominally useless things that are still very much worth knowing for their own sake. This “travelogue” answers fully and excitingly the question of what narrative poetry can do in the 21st century.

 —Jenna Lê

 Every poet should have a dissolute alter ego of Transatlantic panache who ties his ascot as acrobatically as he rhymes. It’s been years since I had this much fun reading a poetry book, though you shouldn’t let the antic charisma of Bladwell J. Garamond distract you from the intelligence with which these poems are made or the depths of feeling they conceal. If you’re like me, or like Bladwell sampling his first shot of laudanum, these are poems you’ll down at a “rabid quaff.”

 —Christopher Childers

If you have ever been thrilled by feats of human grace, dexterity, or ingenuity, then reading The Travels of Blad J. Garamond will be a familiar experience. Austin Allen’s collection is a tour de force—a debonair, hilarious romp full of lexical snap and lushness. Its rhymes are gasp-worthy, its intelligence flamboyant, its formal nimbleness nothing short of flirtatious. Blad is a masterwork of craft, but, like the best light verse, it is also political. The terrific effort that goes into a book like this is a reminder that its author believes art is worth making, and we, his audience, are worth entertaining. Especially in an era like ours—whose dominant forces disdain art, artist, and audience together—reading this book feels luxurious and even subversive. To write poems like these is one thing; to do it flawlessly is another; and to make that flawlessness look inevitable is a spectacular feat indeed. No one does it better.

—Claire Wahmanholm

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Austin Allen is the author of Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Books), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. He has worked as an editor at Abbeville Press and as a writing instructor at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Cincinnati, and Emerson College. He currently teaches writing and literature at the University of the Virgin Islands.