Praise for This is a Room Where You Wait for New Language

“Luis Neer’s poems deal in confusion, anticipation, a frantic and constant searching. I keep visualizing them as burlap sacks full of broken mirrors, with Neer dragging them from mountaintop to starry parking lot, hastily assembling a fragmented reflection, trying to clarify some bigger picture, desperate to decipher the bit of self glinting back. In his debut chapbook, Neer defends us from that overwhelming tide we call being alive. He’s ‘gripping ten thousand roses as tightly as possible’ and somehow manages to not drop a single one.“

— August Smith, author of Bird Lizard Horse



“Poetry as earthquake, poetry as new skin layering and peeling in the festival of language we thought we knew. There is a future you, the one who stands fortified after reading Luis Neer. Mountains fall on roads but the poet keeps moving around us, a new ecliptic burned into the night on a pair of flaming shoes. How long have we waited for this path to break under our feet? Thank you poet!”

— C. A. Conrad, author of ECODEVIANCE



“Neer’s poetry elevates the familiar—high school halls, football fields, the uncomfortable solitude of reading Sartre alone in bed all morning—into something entirely surreal and otherworldly. His poems are excruciatingly self-aware while also reflecting a desperate need to transcend oneself and take the whole world in at once. He approaches reality, hoping to be met with mercy, love, an explanation for all of it.”

— Kate Monica, author of Nervous Universe