“The ‘trysts’ of Lina Ramona Vitkauskas’ chapbook, A Neon Tryst, are shot through with ‘neon’—that is, they are saturated with chemicals, textures, atmosphere, and media. According to this synthetic cosmology, ‘In an affair/arms laugh,/they become sheer.’ That is to say, they—arms, bodies, weapons, trysts—become both medium and adjective, both see-through and material. As in Antonioni’s great films, the…

“Lina ramona’s chapbook, Shooting Dead Films with Poets, is an improbable treasure. These fourteen poems call out to Cocteau and draw from the gamut spanning Georgic bees and a Chicago found to be antipodal to the Volga. Subtitles twine immaculately. They invoke a Cyrillic voyeur penning captions for a movie that knows its own democracy….

“If film is linear, the ultimate time-based medium, during which we are supposed to listen and watch attentively, passively, Lina’s poems in A Neon Tryst talk back. These poems create simultaneity, layers, and distillations toward new narrative logics like ‘Let’s laugh until panties.’ Vitkauskas is watching for the poem in the film, writing her own…

“You’ve discovered/invented a unique new kind of mode in the cinepoem genre — bravo…your method in writing the ‘film ekphrastics’ is unique, innovative, and I’ve never read of anyone else doing it before you…” — Bill Knott

“Splendid, grotesque, violent, but always loving, Lina ramona writes like a contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva through a landscape of the uncertain and surreal; the language is made from the nervousness and energy of every bee in the hive. Part ‘rotten aorta’ and part ‘snapdragon wine’, the poems in HONEY IS A SHE form a buzzing network…

Daniel Borzutzky, 2016 National Book Award Winner (Poetry): “It is strange to occupy the world of Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poems, a world where beef takes nebulous forms, Jacques Derrida and Batman speculatively coincide, where cumin forms into fists, where W.H. Auden sets things on fire, while Sartre cowboys ride into a present tense that combines…