“Wallschlaeger’s latest collection is political, personal, and timely.”

“Wallschlaeger’s poems move through complex textures and varied verbal registers, from the ravines of slim, precise lyric, to lakes of reportage and not-so-speculative prose poetry, to the river of song. Waterbaby is a book for this moment, when “our soul’s bodies are half hanging out all the time;” it’s a scorching indictment as much as a drink for the scorched. The book’s “manic xennial vulnerability” and lyric genius zoom in on daily lives and details, leaving nothing and no one unseen. These far-reaching poems reveal a broad perspective and horizon where a future America can be glimpsed. Its poetry is already here.”

“The writing in I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel is, by turns, thrillingly allusive and thrillingly frank.”

“Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger is keen on the complex relationship between debt and domestic life. Her new book Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), a series of sonnets that consciously disrupt their own formal limits, discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself. Wallschlaeger’s poems feel timely, as the links between property ownership, alienated labor, and the history of black slavery in the United States (‘Greasy gangrene hamburger wrapper of a country,’ in her words) become clearer by the day. She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life — a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image.”

“In her deftly-aimed, disarmingly poised debut, Nikki Wallschlaeger leads us phrase by phrase through the many dim and brightly lit houses of our American psyche in this pitiless new century: “Hospitals. Lighted for end times. They run on glossy generators & backup generators, lights of all dream.”