Irresponsibility

Chris Vitiello

Reviews of the book

“Poetry can offer any number of pleasures, instructions, and provocations, but here’s the rare virtue discovered in Irresponsibility: through countless disjunctions, intrusions, addresses, commands, citations, indulgences, jokes, and fugitive philosophical arguments, Vitiello somehow stays direct and trustworthy as a user of language—he allows, moreso invites us, to take him at his word, and that is a bold, generous way to write poetry today. Let’s hope both the naysayers and the extollers of work like this give it more of the patient, serious consideration it warrants. Let’s hope more poetry dares, as Irresponsibility does, to sandwich itself between a clean, stark, sober, pitch-perfect modernist iconicity—the book’s front cover—and a surprising, child-like, quotidian, benevolent iconicity—the book’s back cover, which is almost entirely taken up by a photograph of a young girl, presumably the author’s daughter, standing in front of a bakery case and, with a pleasant, honest smile, presenting a cookie.” —from the review by John Harkey in Coldfront