"Mark Turpin’s marvelous poems about people at work make a contribution to American literature: they have a tender, grave moral awareness like Thomas Hardy’s, with a lyrical wit and invention grounded in observation like Elizabeth Bishop’s.  I love reading and re-reading these poems.  They refresh and enlarge my idea of poetry."       "Mark Turpin is a poet of unusual gifts. His work is as likely to recall Thomas Hardy as William Carlos Williams. He has the best kind of technical mastery, the kind that enables him to be direct. I find that his poems can make me gasp at their accuracy, yet he never seems to be trying to impress or merely dazzle. Mark Turpin's poems often take the craft of carpentry, his profession, as their narrative locale; but this is like saying that George Herbert often writes about a church. Turpin is a meditative and social poet whose real subject is the connection between one person and another— sometimes, between one person and all others. His material is not local color, but the universal, and the building trades are presented not as exotic but for their likeness to the rest of life." —Robert Pinsky "Physical particularity, flawless writing, great muted tones, subtle relation to the self—I love these aesthetics of Mark Turpin's poems, as well as their fresh, clean worldliness. This work is so fundamentally substantial and pleasurable that it feels, to me, like an anthem." —Tony Hoagland Mark Turpin’s is poetry in which language has the force of thing and action.  But more, he is interested in what goes on inside the heads of his subjects, mason, carpenter, soldier, or himself.  Thus it is both speculative in texture and direction, with a wonderful tautness and intensity. --Thom Gunn "Mark Turpin hammers words to the page with a journeyman's sure hand. Read poems like "Downslope" and "Jobsite Wind," introduce yourself to the sturdy characters that emerge in poems like "Pickwork" and "Dan Fargo & Sons." These well-wrought poems praise the "spiritual condition" of labor, the thousand nails that hold together "The World of Things." —Dorianne Laux