“[Canaday has] transformed the events and facts into engaging literary works, no small achievement. . . . An ambitious work of poetry.”—Rain Taxi
“Human frailty and genius, human work of horror and salvation, human foibles and superhuman forces: in Critical Assembly John Canaday deploys lyric poetry, with terrific formal intelligence, to tell anew the enduring, fate-ridden story of the Manhattan Project.”—Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate
“Who ever thought that a nuclear holocaust could be turned into poetry? But here it is. A cornucopia of apocalyptic delights. End of the world poetry by many of the people who created its possibility—Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, Otto Frisch, Robert Oppenheimer, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, et al. It’s an answer to Mark Twain’s purported dictum: History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Or, in the words of Manhattan Project physicist Philip Morrison on the eve of the first atomic blast: ‘Only the past is certain. But the future rhymes.’ John Canaday has created a remarkable book. Perverse, original, outstanding, and gut-wrenching.”—Errol Morris, Academy Award–winning director of The Fog of War
“Most of the men and women who invented the first atomic bombs are gone now, but the moral and mortal complexity of their work continues to challenge us. These moving, resonant poems revivify them even as they open that complexity to our understanding.”—Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
“The Manhattan Project now has its Poet Laureate–Historian. Canaday’s Critical Assembly is a tour de force of poetry and penetrating history that bores brilliantly into the Los Alamos experience to reveal the inner thoughts and lives of the Promethean community that altered humanity’s fate during World War II.”—Martin J. Sherwin, coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“John Canaday has given us a unified series of poems that may well stand among the greatest works of poetry in this twenty-first century.”—X. J. Kennedy, author of Nude Descending a Staircase
