In Let X=X, poet Cleveland Wall accepts the intrusion of the external into the mindscape as a gracious host. She sits with it, yielding space, even after the "ordinary" becomes the guest who doesn't know when to leave. Her poems evoke these hours, written in the space of exasperated patience, increasingly released from courtesy. Despite any lingering lures of couth, Wall is at her best when she excuses herself for the teapot and heads out through the back door-owing nothing to the empty cups. Elynn Alexander, editor at Full of Crow Press
"The Dictionary in My Head," "Slattern," "Dromomania," "Once I Thought I Was Wrong But I was Mistaken," "Apothecary Dream," "My Rogue Self," "The Window on Nobody Home," "Hydrangea Rage".... skim the Table of Contents of Cleveland Wall's Let X=X, and you immediately get an idea of the rich and varied play of the mindset loose in this book. Here is a wry, quirky, intelligent, generous, probing voice that will knock you off balance a little but always pull you back to your metric feet. Cleveland Wall presents us a fallen world but does so in a language so engaging and regenerative we are invited to embrace this world in all of troublesome and marvelous eccentricities. Once you have read this book you will want to read it again. And again. Its electricity becomes your own; on any page, you can tap into its power and re-charge yourself.
Christopher Bursk, author of Improbable Swervings of Atoms
"What is the point of dreaming/ about the possible?" one of the poems in Cleveland Wall's Let X = X asks as it takes the reader on one of many flights of imagination, wit, curiosity, and love of language offered in this collection. Playful, wise, and filled with delights, Wall's poems ponder the ordinary objects and occurrences of daily life (an oak leaf falling on a head, a flash of mylar confetti in a carpet, the question of a cup of tea) with a rueful intelligence and keen gaze that magnify and deepen all that they consider.
Hayden Saunier, author of How to Wear This Body