"There is something spare and trance-like in Christian Gullette's mesmerizing Coachella Elegy. The source of the intensity, as in many of the landscapes Gullette describes, is gradation and precision, tremors of warning rather than full-on earthquakes. The poems' structures, often unfolding in lean couplets or tercets, carry some of the compressive energy, exactness of detail, and coolness of haiku, or David Hockney swimming pools. The subjects are raw. A brother's death. The speaker's husband's ocular cancer. The landscape's diminishing wildness in a tremulous, post-AIDS California. I admire Coachella Elegy's refinement, its nuanced approach to deep emotion. I feel the tremors in my bones."

- Diane Seuss

"In restless, miraculous poems, Christian Gullette turns his gaze to a California haunted by memory and mortality. To make a self out of wilderness, to reconcile the will to survive with the fragility of love and the environment, to accept the past's persistence: 'This could be our utopia.' Wandering in the desert, commuting between San Francisco and poolside paradises, his wise and moving debut, Coachella Elegy, is a spiritual autobiography in verse-in which hot sun and bright pleasures are stays against loss."

- Richie Hofmann

"There is something at once elegant and seething about Coachella Elegy, its cool eroticism and poolside betrayals. Christian Gullette upends diction and expectation, his sculptures 'ironic, ' his landscape a discourse where 'wind in palms signals / a desert revising itself into dusk.' Like Thom Gunn, Gullette hides in plain sight-between the lines, subtle grief all the more grievous. The poems in Coachella Elegy are gorgeous, sinister, and clear as water."

- Randall Mann