A Reaction to Someone Coming In

Author: Wendy Lotterman

Publisher: Futurepoem

Wendy Lotterman's A Reaction to Someone Coming In exhibits sangfroid as an excess. It's so poised, cerebral, and scrupulous that if you blink you might miss that the underlying subtext of these poems is eros. Sex and love, girlhood and motherhood, are always in transition, dematerialized, and slightly comic in a way reminiscent of Katy Lederer's work. These almost casually flawless pieces hum with a plucky percussion à la Joyelle McSweeney, forgo lyricism and metaphor in favor of concepts and taxonomy, and reinvent the prose poem into a cool continuous plane. 
—Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia

Speaking the intertwined language of dream, marketing, and exurban primal scenes, Lotterman's sly, wise, and sometimes scorchingly funny poems alert me to a newness I hadn't anticipated (and then I remember: that's what newness is). A Reaction to Someone Coming In is a mordant and beautiful book.
—Lucy Ives

Wendy Lotterman is a scientist of feeling, here presenting discoveries with surgical precision. If it's true that "no good thing can be saved from a three-legged relay with the bad," then what forms the third leg? Maybe it's these cool, discomfiting lines, which invent a canny language for a "weird, denuded universe" where "the event postdates the mood it turned into." The lyric mode of A Reaction to Someone Coming In is intimate like an appendectomy is intimate, only your ex and your mom are watching, which definitely makes it better, even exquisite.
—Kay Gabriel