The Unfortunates
The subjects of this astonishing portrait gallery of poems are profoundly unnerving, alarming, haunting, touching and distressing. This is one of the most deeply unsettling books of poetry I have read in a very long time. The dramas of these portraits are all the more powerful and disturbing by virtue of the quiet, understated terms in which they are composed.
— Anthony Hecht
“Borges” & Other Sonnets
“Borges” and Other Sonnets will come to be identified as one of the spearhead books of the new literary movement being fostered by the American sonnet.
— Felix Stefanile
Luís de Camões: Selected Sonnets
William Baer’s brilliant translation of Luís de Camões’s Selected Sonnets is a literary achievement and one that will bring renewed interest to these classic texts. Students and all lovers of poetry will find it extremely valuable.
— Virgil Suárez
The Ballad Rode into Town
I don’t know any other poet but William Baer better equipped to restore the ballad to popularity. The Ballad Rode into Town will captivate people who ordinarily don’t like poetry. Like his great medieval forerunners, Baer gives us passion, sudden death, and melodrama in infectious rhymed stanzas, surprising us with plot twists and horrific outrage. It’s a wonderful book, one for both gobbling down and cherishing.
— X. J. Kennedy
Psalter
These remarkable well-turned sonnets by William Baer are both faithful and fresh. They re-tell the old stories with an easy and lucid eloquence, often from surprising points of view, and always with a keen understanding.
— Richard Wilbur
Love Sonnets
In his delightful Love Sonnets, William Baer has gathered what we know about “the tender passion” and conveyed it in all its guises. Like Lucretius in the fourth chapter of his masterpiece, On the Nature of Things, Baer moves from vivid description to humor (often dark), to despairing honesty, and finally to praise of this most universal human experience.
— Rhina P. Espaillat
