“I don’t know where I am, what/story I’m telling anymore—”
- Alice Notley

"As wildly visionary as it is linguistically alive, Gabriel Kruis’s Acid Virga, drills down into the bedrock of American life to produce a book unparalleled in its exploration of how visionary experience and social upheaval collide in ways that are both transformative and annihilating. Like Blake, Kruis "has set his forehead against the ignorant Hirelings" in this series of extended meditations on social decay and religion, erotic life and drug and drug addiction, the life of the spirit and the letter of the law, and the subconscious ways in which relations between parent and child become ghost structures that make and maim us in later life. His disabused yearnings for the sublime are tempered by a fiercely analytical intelligence that allows for maximum fluidity of conception achieved with maximum hardness of execution."
-Tom Sleigh

"Reading Gabriel Kruis's Acid Virga had a profound and lasting effect on me. I marvelled in his language and formal innovations which are rich with familiar references yet surprising at the same time. Many great poets know how to do these things. What makes this work singular is the more difficult to articulate sense that each word on the page has a double that is working on us... at a cellular level, creating space to connect the particulars of one's life story with the historical. Words serve as flowers with "pastel codes of grief." Or bones the earth wants to cough up. If you've ever been conscious, and felt a little disturbed about it, of life as ancient and ephemeral or that falling apart is an integral force, this is a book to read over and over."
-Stacy Szymaszek