“What a remarkable sensibility lives in Mark Neely’s Late Stage, at times cynical and witty, at times filled with awe at an America that is at once beautiful and uncanny and more than a little frightening. Here is ‘the mayor’s blue campaign sign in the gun store window.’ Here is a ‘Tupperware blue sky.’ Here are ‘turkey buzzards hunched like crash victims on the water tower’s whitewashed railing.’ Neely’s is a mind keen in observation, able to construct lines of poetry that slice into each other, that make sparks. More than that, his work has a kind of musical dexterity and intelligence that I rarely encounter, always revealing itself on its own energetic and brilliant terms.”

— Kevin Prufer, Final Judge, Jacar Press Full-Length Poetry Contest