The warm, empathic poems in Chris Green’s latest collection are a life-affirming, alternative reality to the “loneliness business” of America’s “huge and swollen darkness.” With crisp language and formal dexterity, Green finds dignity and grace in the domestic, celebrating the everyday exuberance of love’s steady radiance. These poems bring us back home—back to the place where the quiet “frills of philosophy” are as necessary as the wild wisdom of children.
—Tony Trigilio

The epigraph for Chris Green’s Résumé is taken from Brodsky’s employment trial in the Soviet Union: “I changed jobs because I wanted to learn more about life, about people." These clear-eyed yet inventive poems about work offer a hard-won wisdom that lifts us above suffering to understanding. Green’s is a marvelously spare and colloquial voice with the kind of detail that cherishes and transforms our lives, that compels us with the authority of experience. His material is his own and others brutal and toxic jobs, which in the hands of such a skillful poet, provide a vision that reaches beyond the subject to his spare but complex epiphanies: “. . . everything in the end/is suffering, even love.” Nothing is exaggerated—like Green’s style—just precise and credible realizations that resonate and illuminate—grit, humor, vision—everything necessary.
—Christopher Buckley

Chris Green's Epiphany School, penned with all the wonder and curiosity of a wise child, is not a book for the timid, the slack-minded, the duped or sleeping. These are poems that hold us in their headlights and tap our backs in the dark, that beg us to notice the life and death of our lives, the big and small moments of illumination. Green's language is unhurried, epistolary, his impulse the guy's next to us at the Cubs' game who snaps our picture when a foul ball lands in our lap or knocks us unconscious. Either way, he's got our back.
—Maureen Seaton

The Sky Over Walgreens is a terrific book that explores being a human animal with just the right admixture of compassion, candor and wonder. Green is a super lucid poet: comic, clear eyed, and smart. He’s not afraid, in these poems, to be seen in the company of every kind of love, and to acknowledge love’s shadows. His poems make me laugh and cry (sorry about the cliché but it’s true!) but never in that manipulative way where one feels ashamed of one’s tears. Green is equally adept at dealing with humor and suffering. His spot on homages to other poets are some of the best I have read. There is nothing predetermined about these poems. They are excellent examples, rather, of “the art where each stroke is a sailor/arriving at port.” Whether he’s writing from the point of view of a dog (“If there is anger in me, it is squirrels. I’d like to take their trees and small funds of nuts and leave them with nothing but their precious acrobatics”) or revealing what Captain Ahab orders at Starbucks (“one last grande white chocolate mocha caffe Americano no foam latte”) or writing about “Fertility Woes” or juxtaposing his grandmother’s death with a shark documentary, Green has given us a fascinating variety of truly affecting, limber poems, all of them inventive and a joy to read.
—Amy Gerstler