“Visceral, erotic, tender, accurate: this poet’s uncompromising gaze, ‘from beneath all that love and lace’ touches body and soul, interior and exterior, urban landscape and wilderness shore, ‘threading through concrete and light.’ From the ‘glossy green tile’ of Union Station ‘(twenty doors open at once)’ to Lake Huron’s ‘green-grey rowel of water/and foam,’ Jim Nason’s Narcissus Unfolding carries its imprint of human presence – the struggle to love, the need for redemption – even as it recognizes animal forms, ‘As if I were the imagined thing.’ This voice knows us, inside and out, from the erotic gaze of the male for the male to ‘the drawn-out stutter of a radiant heart.’ ‘To be a girl,’ Nason writes elsewhere, ‘…a man/like a man able to love.‘”
~E. Alex Pierce

“By now you have given your eyes/ to the window,” writes Jim Nason of a sleepless night. But throughout this wonderful collection, Nason’s clear-eyed gaze is searing, his perceptions of the natural world and the human startling. His natural musicality combines with the honesty of his poems to bring us closer to our wishes, failings, emotional truths (“I want teacher to love me”; “the terrible flaw/ of your father’s hand/ bruising her face”). Narcissus Unfolding gives us poems of presence in a troubling world, engagement with others, a special brilliance in capturing nature in the city and in the country, and the unsparing focus of an accomplished poet.”
~Maureen Hynes