on POST CLASSIC:

erica kaufman's poems command me to follow the circuitous routes her words travel on the way to the occasion of a poem; I am swept along by her singular and sorrowful grammar. To read her is to know recombinant, reactive linguistic space, where poetry is coming from and always trying to get to. There's something neurological about her style but then you have to map it onto literary and personal history...and how is that done? Her "narrator without personality" is nonetheless wailing; she fears dying "gay and alone in the woods covered in ticks." Holding the high concept and the bloody high stakes together is paradoxical; it's hard. Only a master can do it.  Simone White

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If disequilibrium is our difficulty to fit and fix new ideas into our minds, then erica kaufman has always been the solution. Part of the addictive qualities of these extraordinary new poems is not just the poet's fresh concepts, but her genius ability to carve the spaces in our brains for her readers to understand and change how we see and act with the world around us. This is poetry to be shelved under Revolution.   CAConrad

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on INSTANT CLASSIC:

Fine tuned economy balanced with rhythmic alliteration of word density almost belies the intention of "classic" yet erica kaufman exhibits a sophisticated fleetness in her line design actions. Beautiful, thoughtful, a music for the eye, heart, soul and mind.  Thurston Moore

 

How her work can fragment, bump, fall away, pile on and still exude an aura of warmth and kindness and slapstick good times sound is an alchemical mystery that makes postmodern poetry and erica kaufman’s art beating in it be the game in town always worth watching.  Eileen Myles

"We are all mutants in our own gaze,' says erica kaufman, in this set of Milton-inflected exploratory poems that casts its gaze on what we own and what owns us. In the beginning is variation and change; it is our common ground. Mutants of the world: unite! We have nothing to lose but our cowboy hats. INSTANT CLASSIC: Here & now. And how.  Charles Bernstein

 

on censory impulse:

As I get older I know only two things: the starless chaos within (Kafka) and the random stars above (Proust). No moral center and thus no margin, no moral order outside or in and thus no disorder.  In the poetry of erica kaufman, we seem to hear the music of this random landscape with no teleology but Darwin Her humor is full of horror at snobbism and injustice and the acceptance of the most comical social sketch.  Her poems are by an adult woman who loves love without constraints, and no less believes that language is for a subversive voice, not simple structures. Who knows better that poetry is still woman in revolt?  David Shapiro