Brian Henry's new book needs to be experienced as a whole. Opening it at random and sampling a few pages might give the reader a sense of the book's tone - as well as its preliminary situation (dying of the plague, a man wonders back on his life, its disturbances and violations). But a partial reading could not fully appreciate the book's most pivotal fact: how the narrative ground of the 40 QuarantineA" poems is overturned by a completely different principle of composition in the series of 40 'mirroring' poems entitled ContagionA". - In the moment between the closure of the narrative portion and the opening of the cryptic appendix, a profound change has occurred: the fragments now examined appear to be the exhumed 'remains', the mysterious petrifaction, of lines just previously encountered in the first section. - This is the exquisitely executed impact of Quarantine: :Contagion's concept - one experiences composition and decomposition as central to writing's paradox: the life - and death - of the writer.A" (Zack Finch, Boston Review) In this ghostly, dead man's series, a stark world of violence and disease arises like a reworking of Bergman's The Seventh Seal. [Henry's] language is robed in history's strange temporality, running back and forth, hitting the present again and again. Yet, curiously, it is a book without time or place - the river is any river, the plague is any plague , and the time clearly could be now.A" (Eleni Sikelianos)