“If we accept, as we should, that in the best of roots reggae there exists this wonderful convergence of sensuality, political awareness, spiritual intensity and communal celebration while achieving the most elegant moments of lyric grace and vulnerability, then we must accept that John Stanizzi’s Hallelujah Time is a sequence of poems wholly steeped in the reggae aesthetic, and we are the better for this.”
~ Kwame Dawes, Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems
“Again and again in this image-laden collection of poems, John Stanizzi adapts Bob Marley’s lyrics as resonant starting points for his own formally observant and wide-ranging engagements with a troubled world. What I find most pitch-perfect and moving is how Stanizzi insists, as Marley did, that we can, even with all of our shortcomings, respond without naiveté to trauma, loss, and war with generosity and love; in this regard his poetry is a rare exemplar.”
~ Jonathan Andersen, Stomp and Sing
