"In Texases John Poch's vision of his land is as real as mesquite debris or a governor who 'jogs just down the road / with a pistol for coyotes.' At the same time, it is ethereal, entering poems visited by angels and biblical cadences and scriptural tones. Indeed, it is everywhere. Poch creates this landscape and its people with skill and beauty, in a voice that combines wisdom and humor, enlivening a book that is a joy to read."

"Like the 'staked plains, dry-land, long view man' he praises in one poem, John Poch knows the harsh beauty of Texas, and in this new collection he gives us a plural, abundant portrait of his beloved place. Here are prose poems, sonnets, villanelles, and all the enduring pleasures of formal verse, brought back down to earth by Poch's unflinching eye, and his hard-won knowledge of work, and people, and the past. Texases is a kind of psalter, full of graceful and moving love songs to the land."

"John Poch's work embodies a powerful range of moods that make him a companionable tour guide; his verse shines with clear-sightedness, beauty, charity, and grace. Ultimately, Texasesi> showcases the work of a gifted poet whose vision is connected to the place he's made his home, a place whose past and present offers potent insights for our time and times to come."

"Compellingly, while Texases argues for love, for faith and for a joy as against absurdity and violence, it offers no easy resolution or platitudes, and even the final poems of the book maintain the sense that, as we are faced with old gods, urgent and crucial, the truths must be sung, must, to lift a phrase from one of the poems, 'prophecy good.'"