“Empires crumble and the dust continues to contaminate the land, the air, our bodies, and our conscience. What a blessing to have Eugene Gloria help us reckon with the troubled histories that shape America, the Philippines, and every point in between. If the broken world had a musical score, it would thunder like the disquieting poems in Sightseer in This Killing City.“

– Rigoberto González

“These fast-paced narratives are cacophonous and unsettling. But first and foremost, they are tales that praise ordinary people. Their stories sing out to the reader with heart-rending vividness. This book is a rough and sleepless journey told by a tourist who keeps arriving at a Goon Republic but never stays. A fascinating read.”

– Marilyn Chin

“Considered, beautiful and nimble. . . In [Sightseer in This Killing City], there is an exquisite, erudite, yet plain-spoken care with language from a poet well-read across continents and centuries . . . It is a continuing pleasure to dwell in the worlds, and work, that [Gloria] has wrought.”

– Anisfield-Wolf.org

“Gloria employs a fastidious agglomeration by, for example, drawing together postmodern Spanish architecture, nineteenth-century French poetry, 1970s English rock, and everlasting Portuguese longing, all in a single poem! . . . A seriously outstanding collection.”

– Booklist

“In the tradition of Whitman and the Beats, Gloria’s ‘discourse of bleeding utterances’ memorably charts cities, countries, and his own family.”

– Publishers Weekly

“Eugene Gloria spins the elegant, elegiac songs of a longtime traveler, moving through vast, painterly landscapes, among the deep spirits of exile and all that hovers just out-of-reach for every border-crosser. There’s a keen sense of fleeting presence on this earth coupled with quick insight for clues along the path–a darting, deep eye turned to rich detail and melancholy, and the startling possibilities of linkage that meandering brings. His gift is breathtaking.”

– Naomi Shihab Nye

“Gloria gets better and better. His new work practices a profound care for the particulars of an individual life and the world at large, integrating the values of philosophical inquiry, reverie, and imagination. Poem after poem enacts a yearning for wilder and deeper sense of human belonging, using language that has all the luminosity and intensity of a spiritual pilgrimage, and the melancholy of racial, cultural, and spiritual alienation. These elegant, intelligent, and passionate poems hurt and reward us.”

– Li-Young Lee

“Gloria’s new book demonstrates a central quality of poetry: the power to hear harmonies beyond the obvious ones, finding new undertones of meaning…Gloria brings the historical and contemporary into fresh, vivid, relation.”

– Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post