“A poem is the cry of its sentences. Jan Mieszkowski explores how sentences are made, and broken, in aphorisms and slogans as well as in Schlegel, Poe, Dickinson, and Stein (among many others). Crises of the Sentence illuminates the aesthetics of literary style––as well as the style of literary aesthetics.”

Charles Bernstein, author of Pitch of Poetry

“No book has given me such critical pleasure in a long while, in part thanks to the satisfaction afforded by the successive unfolding of Jan Mieszkowski’s own flawless sentences. I won’t call them elegantly crafted since he hasn’t manufactured them for the reader’s pleasure. Rather, the book’s virtue is to make us supremely aware of the strange capacity for one ‘complete thought’ to give way to another as a property inherent in all good prose.”

Anne-Lise Francois, author of Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience

“Crises of the Sentence ponders what we stand to gain through an embrace of the density of form. What does it mean to find pleasure rather than pain in confronting something so dense you have to read it three times over? To sit with a sentence as it is, before rooting around to discover its meaning? To feel comfortable with linguistic inconsistency and indeterminacy? It might be the chance we need, not merely to interpret, but to change the world, or at the very least, something in ourselves.”

Times Literary Supplement

"Mieszkowski crackles with ideas. In Crises of the Sentence, he draws from a vertiginous array of sources—Derrida to Dickens, Hegel to Hemingway—to explore what a sentence is, and how it has been used, both as a powerful tool and as a force that is ultimately beyond our control."

Reed Magazine

“After you've read this book, it will be clear that troubles can arise out of misunderstanding of language, beginning with the misapprehension of its basic unit, the sentence.”

NBC 2 Fort Myers, Florida