We authors love to hear nice things about our books. So blurbs can be especially gratifying, when a peer or otherwise-in-the-know type is able to recommend you. However, as we all know, blurbs can also be terribly written or, in this case, overwritten.

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity. For twenty-six years he has been writing novels about what it means to defend this essence, this unique light, against a world designed to extinguish it. To the End of the Land is his most powerful, shattering, and unflinching story of this defense. To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.

Wow. That’s… well… unbelievable. Really.  I’ve got three blurbs on the back jacket of my upcoming book, Glimpse—the first time I’ve used author recommendations in five books. It was actually a pretty pleasant experience, and I think all three are not only from top-notch poets, but also useful as forms of recommendation (ie, not just little show-off spots for the authors to remind my readers that they too are poets…)