"Profoundly intelligent and erudite, steeped in the metaphysicals, Aaron McCollough’s poems alternately tantalize with their hermeticism and dazzle with their sudden outpourings of radiant clarity. The mirrors so important to this collection are like the surfaces of lakes: protean, dreamy, distorting, swallowing up and transforming everything in their purview, as McCollough’s voracious intellect swallows up language and delivers it back to us refracted, estranged—as the past itself is transfigured by our memory of it. I found myself reveling in this writing, transfixed among the ‘dusty stars.’"
—Donna Stonecipher

"Aaron McCollough’s stunning new collection of poetry, Salms, is as attentive to the merging of poems and psalms as it is to the nearly indistinguishable sound of salms and songs. Here, ‘the glazier carries an eye’; ‘split wood [is] proof the wound is real,’ and ‘a hoed stone sings.’ Whether attending to memory, observation of the natural world, metaphysical poets, love, God, or mortality, the spaces these poems traverse are destabilized by shifting contexts and the uncertain ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘out.’ I feel myself reaching after wherever I already am. I become curious about the lyric and the psalm. Is inhabiting always reinhabiting? I’ve just loved reading and rereading Salms; this is exactly why I come to poetry, to move toward and away, to hear new music, again."
—Sally Keith