(fleeting)

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I am still astonished and humbled by the generous, acute attention Vessels received from its early readers, such as Claire Wahmanholm:

In Vessels, Robert van Vliet works as a medium, reminding us that foundational texts—in this case the I Ching, Thoreau’s writings, and the Nag Hammadi library—can constitute us as much as the news cycle. Here, past fortitude and present urgency scrape against each other like tectonic plates. In the tradition of such wisdom literature, van Vliet’s poems are koan-like, gnomic, paradoxical, shot through with uncertainty and stitched together with guesswork. But they are also unmistakably tangible: van Vliet shuffles the natural world and fans its elements before us like tarot cards—“a flat cloud stained like a bloody liver”; “a nest of hair above the dry lake”; “thunder swim[ming] over the mountains.” The subject matter of Vessels is nothing less than the act of poetic creation. Van Vliet invites us to consider how and why we make poetry, and how we might use it to survive these times.