Through sheer artistry, Tom Sleigh manages to write...in a transcendent way, and without appeal to the metaphysical assumptions transcendence usually requires. The Chain...floods darkness with brilliant craft.

—Gray Jacobik, Boston Globe

...Sleigh's writing, always lean and spare, seems carved in stone like an ancient alphabet...The Chain is a superb, astonishing book—one of the best I have read in years, rich in poems that deserve to be widely anthologized...

—Susan Mitchell, Agni

In his third book of poems Tom Sleigh achieves a new height for his own considerable art, rich in linguistic pliability and invention, myth and history. It is a style at once accessible, verbally muscular, musically engaging, and cathartic; and it is helping to keep open and alive an idiom in American poetry for speaking about our deepest and most human experiences.

—Josh Weiner, Boston Book Review