"Double Trio moves in the recursive, spiraling way of an improviser juggling a theme. Insofar-I and his travelers move across a quickly shifting landscape of cities and countries, with death keeping time. All three books move in the time of Mackey’s scansion, hitting the hi-hat of that hanging syllable."

Sasha Frere-Jones - Bookforum

"That condition of music that Walter Pater said we all aspire to has been reached by Nathaniel Mackey in his wild merging of sound and sense (both in making it and in rejecting its packaged forms)."

John Yau - Hyperallergic

"What Mackey now calls a ‘long song that’s one and more than one’ is a tale of the tribe with a planetary scope, an expansive lyrico-epic worthy of the cultural demands of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

Michael Leong - Boston Review

"Mackey is doing what might be the most technically virtuosic rhythmo-syntactic work in the English language. No one comes close. I hope these two long poems never end."

Mike Lala - Brooklyn Rail

"Mackey’s music sings transience, sings transliteration, lyricizing its own shifting philosophical constructs as it goes."

Laverne Frith - New York Journal of Books

"Because of [their] crablike logic Mackey’s lines feel simultaneously abraded and buffed, their meanings fugitive, tremulous, mercurial. He is a lyric poet whose probing of wounds and the whir of words reaches into epic dimensions."

John Palattella - The Nation

"Nathaniel Mackey is a poet of ongoingness involved in a kind of spiritualist or cosmic pursuit."

Edward Hirsch - The Washington Post

"For decades, National Book Award-winner Mackey has devoted himself to creating a long poem that covers ambitious territory — and he begins this installment by recalling how early free jazz musicians re-invented the multi-disc record collection because they needed several albums to record their fertile improvisations; you might say that Double Trio is Mackey's multi-disc box set Double Trio is a libretto of metaphysical music and probably the most important poetry collection to come out this year."

Ken Chen - NPR

"Over the years, Mackey's two works have intertwined into what he calls 'the long song,' recounting the travels of a band of refugees, a 'philosophic posse' exiled somewhere outside of history as we understand it. The destination or substance of their wanderings—the surreal moments when they cross paths with a description of Eric Dolphy’s clarinet, an imaginary tune about Eric Garner, the view from a slaver’s ship, or a nineteen-eighties military campaign—matters less than the sensations and mystical visions they gather along the way. They are constantly starting over, discovering worlds within their worlds. Their journeys don’t tell a story so much as they map a kind of alternative history of humankind.... Mackey's poetry is like an archive of all that the world forgot, what might have been had humans resisted the desire to enslave and colonize one another."

Hua Hsu - New Yorker

"These poems are epic meditations that transform and transcend the everyday into an otherworldly, timeless space."

Publishers Weekly