"What we have here is a lot of poetry worth experiencing, and a radiant reminder that the later work is connected to gifts O'Hara displayed as a young man. Read and recite these poems. Dance a little while you do . . ." -- Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

"It looks like an excellent complement to the selected and collected poems of O'Hara that have been in circulation for so long."--Harriet Staff, The Poetry Foundation

"[The poems] like O'Hara (was) are urbane and hip, filled with abstraction, humor, mystery, poignancy and lyricism. Here is what poetry was in the America of the 50s and 60s."

"O'Hara (1926–66) is widely known as a member of the New York School of poets, whose unyielding craving for artistic expression infused his poetry with the culture of painters, writers, critics, and the movement of 20th-century art in America. His work's primary source, however, remains a singular, inimitable force as he once exclaimed, 'Poetry is life to me.' O'Hara's poems record and then stay in the occasion happening, moving even among the static. 'Why are there flies on the floor/ in February, and the snow mushing outside/ and the cats asleep? Because you came/ back from Paris, to celebrate your return.' Companion to an earlier volume, Early Writings (1977), and the original Collected Poems (1971), this is a portion of an anticipated complete collected poems of O'Hara. American poet Bill Berkson’s introduction comments on O'Hara's self-described act of writing as 'at once as mysterious and practical as there has ever been of the relation of poetry to experience.' VERDICT Add to the aforementioned companion volumes to create a loose Collected, or let stand as is. Either way retrieve an O’Hara collection--he's essential."--Annalisa Pesek