"Elaine Bleakney’s Take the Exit Then Exit is a book of fragments. It is a book that is resolute in the incomplete, broken, half-heard, and half-spoken, and yet it is insistently alive to the strangeness of being and especially of being in relation to other people. At the edges of these poems beckon a wholeness that’s neither desired nor welcome. For Bleakney, wholeness might be another word for the past, story, family, love, or even language, each a form that cannot reflect the complexity and turbulence it contains. Indeed, she is a poet suspicious of form’s illusory promises, and rightly so: 'The worst is feeling / I must spend my life / trapped inside a tree with you.' What is so brave and surprising about Take the Exit Then Exit is that moving through these fragments we arrive at a clear-eyed vision of the self’s ferocity and a radiance that shines –'creaking singing'– like truth."
—Jennifer Chang, author of An Authentic Life

"The poems in Take the Exit Then Exit are notable for their distillation and brevity, their undertow of longing and loss, and their clean diction which cuts like a knife. So much happens between Bleakney’s lines, which hum with the electricity of the unsaid, and the 'formal feeling' Emily Dickinson wrote about, which can come 'after great pain.' Yet there is also resilience here, and wit. How can you resist a poem that begins: 'Two rhododendrons/ hold each other in hell.//And bloom.'?"
—Amy Gerstler, author of Index of Women