“Post-narrative poetry requires of its makers an extraordinary ear and agility with language: as a storyline emerges, transforms, or disintegrates, only a voice supremely confident can unify what remains. Cort Day’s is one such voice, and The Chime, with its concise, persuasive ten-line poems, offers a world and a mind resonant with wit and music.”
—The Antioch Review

“In The Chime, Cort Day has assembled a book-length series of rich and imaginative, ten-line, block-text poems. Day’s poetry functions much like a shoebox diorama: it relies on captivating detail, shadow and the suggestion of character to transcend the physical limitations of form. Should you doubt it, there’s great beauty in smallness, and a great and compelling strangeness to The Chime.”
—American Letters and Commentary

“Cort Day dares to make a sound as complex, as immediate, as keen as its occasion. And the occasion is language moving through and moving with mortality. These poems are the vocable body of a vivid birth, and I welcome them.”
—Donald Revell

“With the prickly sensuality of thistle and the eccentric concentration of the miniaturist, Cort Day’s first book crafts a pixelated music — optical, word perfect, drop-dead arresting, and ultimately inenarrable. Against the desiccation of our most potent feelings, The Chime suicides and flowers; it grows a mind.”
—C. D. Wright

“In response to ‘the contingency of things,’ ‘the heart-stopped forest,’ the ‘toxic blue garden’ and the sheer uncanniness of the quotidian, Cort Day has produced a work of transgressive imaginings, calls and responses, chimes and echoes. It is a work by turns humorous and darkly erotic, where the ships of reason burn on an ocean tuned to an open frequency. That ocean is poetic speech, drowning the reality principle in its surges and its deeps.”
—Michael Palmer