The Promises of Glass

In seven sections—“The White Notebook,” “The Promises of Glass,” “Q,” “Four Kitaj Studies,”” Five Easy Poems,” “In an X,” and “Tower"—Palmer explores language and the "salt sea of autobiographies." The Boston Book Review remarked that The Promises of Glass “seems to shimmer with an immaculate glow”; Publishers Weekly called it “superbly strange, sharply provocative, full of slippery acoustic pleasures.” Reviewing this collection, The Village Voice Literary Supplement acclaimed Palmer “the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.”

"Palmer has managed to view (as a very traditional poet once put it) two worlds at once: to have brought the psychological insights and mimetic rewards we expect from older kinds of poetry into momentary conjunction with the comparatively asocial, startling, elusive pleasures of the new."

–Boston Review