Kristian Enright’s absolutely shocking first book is “a terrible beauty” of madness. As Enright’s “nightmare distills like a leaking faucet,” James Joyce, Mozart, Freud, Proust and countless others battle it out as angels and demons. William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac and Milton break down literary and moral boundaries as zombies help push the author towards the light. Unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Dense, dynamic and dangerous. This book dances around the edges of what we call sane.

— Michael Dennis, author of Coming Ashore on Fire

In sonar, Enright has created delicate and dense layers of poetic text that bounce and echo through literature, philosophy, hospital psych wards, conversation, delusions, the open prairie, and the bright and dark corners and turns of our own minds and hearts. These precise and articulate poems need to be read and reread. They rush and stutter, fragment and proliferate; they insist on creating language for the unspeakable; they blur the edges of both sense and madness. As the voices of the poems navigate through their own dark terrains of fear and longing and joy, Enright invites the reader to find the echoes of her own journeys in this accomplished debut collection.

—Chandra Mayor, author of All the Pretty Girls