In Review
Publishers Weekly "Ekstrand will present a moment or image then shift the lens a fraction to show the side the reader can't quite see . . . with tension aggregating from images being picked apart so delicately."
Drunken Boat Blog "An inventive, graceful, bodied first book, by a poet with a knack like Philip Whalen or—closer to home—Jonathan Williams for building poems out of at-hand detail and quick-take ventriloquy of ambient history and evangelism."
Fanzine "Laodicea is like an extended view out to the horizon with all that land in between . . . within any slight from the Land, even the trivial slight, lies what may or may not be an intractable, unmistakable and dismal resistance to something you are afraid could be you. That Ekstrand’s book can identify this kind of anxiety while not absolutely insisting on resolving it is the larger accomplishment."
North Carolina Literary Review "Laodicea isn't explicitly political, but inasmuch as it describes the landscapes that make the people of our state, it isn't apolitical either. For a book that exults in some of the most lavish and unexpected metaphors in contemporary poetry, it's also true that Ekstrand is, as one poem has it, 'just telling you the facts.'"
B O D Y "Ekstrand deconstructs his experience, be it historical, philosophical or profoundly personal, so the reader concords with the about-to-go-extinct species of an image on the brim of its line or stanza, and thus fulfils it with his empathy and understanding for its destitute state. For were it not for us 'imagining,' there would be blatantly no 'landscape that one / could throw rocks into.'"