Robin Chapman:

I imagine that R. Virgil Ellis has taken on the "Virgil" in his name to honor not only the classical Roman poet but also to signal to readers that, in his company, we will be led on a dizzying journey.

In Recess, we travel, not through war or the seven levels of hell, but careen through the contemporary cosmos’s outer reaches and down into the smallest vibrations of quantum mystery, return to the everyday bedrock, taverns, and marshes of Wisconsin ground, and spin on into the complex dimensions of inner meditative space, riding breath that is sometimes the simple chanting of OM and sometimes the jazzy intoxicated Latinate wordplay that makes meaning and sound reverberate against each other like psychedelic images.

Wisconsin experience flashes throughout the poems. In "Waiting for the Dalai Lama," "the hush came down/like dawn coming up//as she saw him smile." In "End of March", "’You had your say in January, you flakes"/the dug-up earth shouts."

In "The Club 26 Angel," the angel glides through Fish-fry Friday conversations in Janesville. In "Tai Chi and Me," Ellis’s football past encounters "the form of the fair maiden/weaving the shuttle" in class as speedboats go past.

Sitting meditation takes Ellis, in "Neutrino Mantra," into the missing mass of the universe and, in "Earth and Star," into the collapse of self. In "What I Want to Sing," Ellis explains: "What I want to sing opens out past words/crosses to where/the tremolo in the spine sharpens/to an edge of perception so fine/the eyes close, no body sway or meeting of eyes/ can touch it, /".

The collection signals its playfulness in the title of the opening poem, "Recess," a deceptively simple one in which a glass bead captures Ellis’s attention as a child and pulls him into its world; over and over again, the poems will pull us into the puzzle, the mysterious experience, of multidimensional worlds; read again after the other poems, "Recess" takes on the resonant metaphorical echoes of our journey.

In other works on CD and DVD Ellis has added the jazz music, incantatory speaking and complex fractal imagery that are part of his multidimensional performance art. Here, with only the words on the page, we’re asked to participate imaginatively, snapping our own fingers to the perceived beat or entering, briefly, the emptiness, the present, the now. "Recess" is a collection for savoring, offering playful, intellectual, embodied experience.

John Smelcer:

With an unflinching and critical poet's eye, Ron Ellis' sharp phrases catch the motion, textures, and profundity of the world we live in but never fully realize. A good book like this is a gift to the world--a bandage to slow the bleeding.

(John Smelcer is an important Native American writer, certainly one of the most published male writers along with Sherman Alexie and N. Scott Momaday. Allen Ginsberg named him “among the most brilliant younger poets in America.”)

Marilyn Taylor:

These splendid new poems by R. Virgil Ellis reflect his uncanny ability to approach a variety of complex themes with remarkable clarity, using techniques that can’t help but call to mind the harmonies and progressions of contemporary musical composition. Ellis’s instrument of choice is an enormous and finely tuned vocabulary, which he manipulates with expertise as he moves from the earthy (“The pines strain to lie flat / just trying to be sensible”) to the cerebral (“a gust of wind asking wide air knowing not to know”). From poem to poem, this collection exudes the elusive but unmistakable qualities of both humility and wisdom, or—as Ellis himself expresses it here—“a sort of speculative ease.”