"Every artist lives in multiple realms—the public and the private, the perceived and the imagined. In Atria, D. S. Waldman explores the architectures of dream and poem with the eye of a Cubist: constructing a poetry that moves between theory and reverie, between textured music and frank retelling. There is depth here, great depth, as well as the illusion of depth—a narrative of both the confessed and the obscured, as form and content take turns in the foreground. Here, we enter a space of slippages and disguises as Waldman meditates on the preservations and annihilations of art and life, their markmaking and their erasures. Here, Waldman is both artist and subject, both meaning and pattern, where sometimes the smudge is revealed to be not paint, but turpentine."

—Richard Siken

“What makes Atria so compelling is the striking clarity of Waldman’s prose in matters of both theory and the heart.”

— BOMB

“For Waldman, those two arts, the verbal and the sculptural, are more similar than they appear: both are arts of relation, putting lopsided material into unexpected balance, respecting both rigid constraint and chanced-on motion.”

— LitHub

“Waldman’s poems, whether prose or lineated, personal or ekphrastic, are not so much arranged in the book as they are constellated. They hang together to create a system that sometimes orbits gently, sometimes bumps up against itself unexpectedly, and sometimes waits in stillness for a gust of wind, or wayward child, to set it in motion.” —Ryan Teitman, Adroit