Publishers Weekly "TOP 10" Poetry collections, Fall 2022

"This is a book to savor, a book you’ll want to read out loud so you can roll its words around your mouth and taste its many flavors. Its 'juke joint of hot broth,' its 'witchcraft of memory,' its 'razorblade blues,' 'dense, funky collards,' and 'star-field of skin' will make you holler with Cagney in his rage, weep with his sadness, gasp in ecstasy, while sharing spaces of an enduring loneliness blended with a hardknowing earned while maintaining compassion and love. You can feast on his images which are at once surreal and down home, steeped in the real and laughing, along with the imagined and remembered. This is a spread of poetry serving history, mythology, memoir, and current events. It is a deeply personal and profoundly universal banquet served in an embracing black that holds inside all the world’s colors and shadings."—devorah major, San Francisco’s 3rd Poet Laureate

"Daring, open, and honest! Cagney’s poetry beams beyond the surface but from the inner regions of his soul. Do yourself a favor, buy, read, and experience Martian."—Thomas Robert Simpson, AfroSolo Theatre Company

"These extraordinary new poems burst off the page, wild controlled explosions demanding our attention with their intelligence, frustration, wisdom, and love. James Cagney is one of our greats, an absolute gem of American poetry, thankfully hidden no longer." —Matthew Zapruder, author of Why Poetry