Charles Jensen's Instructions between Takeoff and Landing is a poetic primer for living through these recent years "bloated with the arrogance of America." From the personal to the political and back (with a delightful Adrienne Rich-infused cento), Jensen's poems are elegiac, hilarious, and deadly serious. Formally inventive--with a series of "story problems" and quiz questions about what you've just read--Jensen provides an immersive experience, a delicately ironic jolt with each poem.
--Denise Duhamel

In the language of the survey, the memo, the instruction, and the quiz, clarity is of the utmost importance. In Charles Jensen's new collection, what is clear is the scope of Jensen's inventiveness and his acute sense of humor, all of which is honed to a razor-sharp tip. With deft lyric and rhetorical skill, the poems interrogate this American quotidian, urging readers to carefully understand the magnitude of what Jensen's poems ask because there is most certainly going to be an exam at the end. The poems prepare us for the moment when we are tested and when Jensen's searing blend of humor, inquiry, and speculation show us all the answers.
-- Oliver de la Paz

Instructions between Takeoff and Landing is Charles Jensen's most dynamic collection. We find the unexpected. Jensen's dexterity with form and imagination are carefully balanced. Though the voice in these poems is urgent, Jensen wants us to slow down and listen. He tells us: You've come to worry about being lost the way I am lost. I have become a cautionary tale. Jensen's poems are direct, and they address the value and complexity of lives lived in the world around us.
--Ruben Quesada

Charles Jensen's Instructions between Takeoff and Landing exists in an exciting juncture between contemporary lyric meditation and experimental impulses. What I mean by this is that his poetry is recognizable, and is understandable and enjoyable, but it also is influenced by other strands of American poetry, more conceptual methods, where one can come across houses "festooned with streamers and believers // on the baptism's slow afternoon," but the houses change, and suddenly they're houses "with galaxies within" that become "absolved of all their residents." Straight-forward image opens to mystery and formal experiment. This combination is unique to Jensen, as he mixes them in fresh and new ways.
-- John Gallaher