Toon Tellegen’s Raptors is one of those books for which very little can really prepare you. It takes a book like this, seemingly hurled through the ether, to crack us on the head and wake us. This extraordinary long poem, with its startling inventiveness, tests our coma-inducing apathy to all things experimental. [Tellegen’s] beautiful reversals and abrupt tempo shifts point back to a beginning, a new start, a fresh view, and the pace and elastic play of Wilkinson’s English compel us to want to re-read a book we’re still in the process of reading.
George Messo, reviewing Raptors in World Literature Today
Each ingenious variation on the father’s tragicomic hold on his family is followed immediately by the next. Raptors turns out to be brilliantly addictive.
Astrid Alben, reviewing Raptors in the TLS
Van hee writes poems with a combination of clarity and enigma. Don’t be deceived by their reticent small scale. They hold images in exact focus before the eye with delicate and economic power that extends their dimensions in the mind and the feelings of the reader.
Martha Kapos, on Instead of Silence, by Miriam Van hee
Tellegen’s poems are parables for grown-up children. Their world is stripped down, urgent, playful, quirky, familiar as children’s games, yet strangely disorienting. They induce a mini-millennial fever, the disquieting excitement of being about to pass through the needle’s eye.
Phil Fried, on About Love and About Nothing Else, by Toon Tellegen
Judith Wilkinson’s translations are so natural, so tight, and so satisfying that they merit the highest compliment a translation can receive – a suspicion that the poems might not be as good in their original language as they are in English.
John Brehm, The Manhattan Review, on About Love and About Nothing Else