“Tierney’s finely wrought debut captures the electric movement of his mind...a powerful collection.”
LitHub - Best Reviewed Poetry Collections of 2022
“In this magnificent debut, a poet arrives to us fully formed, and Tierney has found ways to transform the mundane into the mysterious and the mysterious into the transcendent. Readers will be swept away by the rigors of syntax, the sparse charged diction, and the voice of these worldly, humane, sophisticated poems. ”
“Rise and Float is resonant with the desire for rapture and the never-easing reality of loss. How do we go on living, these poems seem to ask, bearing what we must bear? And in lines by turns dolorous and defiant, they answer: We watch, we remember, and we sing.”
Tracy K. Smith
“Tierney shows that the lowest points of human experience also prompt us to view the world in a new light, implying that an unfamiliar but authentic vibrancy may be an unintended aftereffect of anxiety, depression, loss, or suffering.”
Tryn Brown, Colorado Review
“In these poems of turnpikes, water, and migraine light, filled with grief and life, the poet tells us it’s all right that ‘we don’t love / living.’ Here, precision is a form of metaphor, language a facet of experience; the poet writes with a kind of allusive purity and vulnerability—‘each thought a texture’—that I find moving. Rise and Float is that rare thing, a book of one striking poem after another. If I could write something as tender and nearly perfect as ‘You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With’—a lightning strike, Randall Jarrell would call it—then I might give up writing.”
Randall Mann
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