‘The Beautiful Losses is an unusually beautiful book, telling with wit, irony and occasional satire, stories that feel lived, advancing thematically towards a kind of goal. The stories are informed by a complex of loves – ‘Our fridge, the size of love’ is a generous fridge. The voices are often those of older people in conversation. Moving through the world they have memory, resentment, anger, but integrity, too, so they hang on to the possibility of rapport. They keep talking, and the end – even at the very end of the book – is not silence. Old age has a very different sensuality from what the young enjoy, and it is wonderful to find it here so intensely evoked, so that the reader lives it.’   --- Michael Schmidt

Michael Schmidt (UK) is the editor of Carcanet Press and PN Review

Frederick Pollack is an American poetry treasure. He has written a huge amount, with an almost unparalleled dedication to poetry; The Beautiful Losses compiles poems from several collections. The world of Pollack’s witnessing is often urban and somewhat sinister. Something or someone that may or may not be named is always lurking, even in the shadows of plain sight. It is a world where “An unmarked plane is an inside joke,” and the point is neither pain nor information; “The point, ultimately, is procedure…” Pollack is an incomparable examiner of the procedures that govern human life, that make it at once beautiful and horrible. Walking through any cityscape with this American Original is itself a poetic act; and his work, I think, will outlive that of many more honored contemporaries.    --- Robert Mcdowell

Robert McDowell was the editor/publisher of Story Line Press. He is the author of Sweet Wolf and many other books.

The Beautiful Losses is a delight to read -- the poems are brilliant, often wry and ironic, or humorous, with portrayals that are fearless and unforgiving. Pollack presents us with a complex world. He explores the personal and the public spheres, the emotional and the intellectual, and a prodigious range of themes: the culture wars and aesthetic values, power, international bureaucracies and their position papers, vaccines and infrastructure, "focus groups that never quite focus" , time machines, love. He masters lofty themes, yet we get concrete details: of specks on an old mirror, he writes, "here an insect/ secreted or died, there a passing drink spattered." Pollack will infect you with his insatiable curiosity: where else will you find poems where you'll meet Zeno, Sophocles, Corelli, Viera da Silva, the Beat poets, William Corbett, Harold Bloom and his School of Resentment, Godzilla & King Kong, and engage intellectually with someone who says "my aim/ is to own and emasculate/ all gods."? The Beautiful Losses is poetry worth a second and third reading.  --- Vinod Busjeet

 Vinod Busjeet is the author of well-reviewed novel Silent Winds, Dry Seas, published in 2022 by Penguin Random House.