These poems are visionary. There is something ancient in their owls and dusks, their cold lakes, their awareness of the unseen. Chris Dombrowski is watching with an attention so exquisite it seems, at times, that a witness is barely present-a breath of quiet. By turns Rilkean and Basho-esque, the poems guide our eyes out of their well-worn habits and let us see, as if the world were constantly charged with strangeness and the dream of beauty, draped with twilights where, in the junkyard, 'mirrors strike small skies against our bodies.'"

One of the finest first collections I've seen this year.

It's not that By Cold Water's beautiful, though it very much is, page after page. No, what the book's doing, in ways I find miraculous, is working at the root level of both the natural world around us and the wonders that our heads are full-time stuffed with....Dombrowski's work is the rarest sort.

To stand upright and see the eye ascend: this is Dombrowski's core proposal. In By Cold Water location beautifully becomes both virtue and task of virtue. These poems are truly afoot with their vision, and I welcome them."

Dombrowski, in (this) exciting first full-length volume, seems to work from a loose, ancient, explosive formula: poem = dream = vision = song = prophecy = myth. (His) work draws on primal sources of energy and music....and suggest(s) that if anything can save the forsaken world, it may be visionary song.

As we say of a car, it has clean lines; or of an ant's eyes that they are closely engaged; the way we exclaim of an image that it bridges stars, Chris Dombrowski's poems ennoble their page."

Language enfolding around language, punctuation cast aside, and the watering mouth of our ear and tongue wagging after such beauty: this is the poetic terrain of a young poet whose work holds so much promise (and so much of it already fulfilled in this wonderful book)."

Dombrowski graces his poems with descriptions and observations so exquisite that the natural world appears a much more intimate place that it has for quite some time. Sentimental musing of nature in literature can only be a single layer. Dombrowski shows how building upon that layer in order to reflect how nature is as active a force as human emotion. Luckily for us, these are poems that beckon us to return."

By Cold Water is a wonderful book of poems. I read it several times utterly engrossed in its natural imagery, the grace in which the process of revelation tells us what we didn't know, describes what we never noticed. Dombrowski is a fine poet. I could have said that he's a fine young poet because he's only thirty-three but in truth he's a thousand years old like any fine poet."

Intimates of wasp nests and barbed wire, of mountains' minerality and the light sequestered inside a horse's mane, Chris Dombrowski's poems word the world-and their reader-into largeness, with specificity, tenderness, and passion."