Critical Commentary
In No Blues This Raucous Song, the language is as fresh and succulent as a cut pear. Wagner’s work is full of joy. It is also full of soulfulness and sorrow, but these are packed into lines of such delicacy and tautness that even woe sings like a plucked string. As I was reading, I realized that I was in the presence of a small classic. —Lynn Emanuel
Lynn Wagner’s poems deftly honor our unruly impulses. She has a marvelous ear for rhythmic urgencies of the American tongue and a wicked wit. No word goes unnoticed on her shrewd yet passionate watch. —Baron Wormser
I don’t usually fall in love with a book before I’ve even opened its cover. But it just happened with Lynn Wagner’s chapbook, No Blues This Raucous Song. -Sara C. Rauch review in NewPages.com
Wagner’s use of language is a heady mix of the blues rhythms she reveres and reverberates to, and a lonely formality that puts her in a fishing boat with Elizabeth Bishop drinking, or invoking Emily Dickinson in the heat of her hellish room where the “the keys clacked ceaselessly all night long.” - Deborah Bogen review on Poemeleon
