"Tinged with elegy both direct and indirect, the poems in Roderick’s Darkness for Beginners critique their own domestic concerns even as they carry us into almost inexpressibly tender moments of a father grateful for the sunlight in his daughters’ hair. Along with wit, self-deprecation, and astute social commentary, there is a little of Arthur Rimbaud’s claim that ‘I is an other’ here, conveyed by restless questioning of self and by unsettling simultaneities. A sequence written to a late friend raises the stakes of Roderick’s investigation into how lives coincide, illuminate each other, and leave profound marks."

Catherine Barnett, author of "Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced"

“As achingly shown in Darkness for Beginners, our America of plush lawns, petty notifications, and metastatic dread is a place where ‘tragedy and farce / mingle freely.’ But in poem after poem, Roderick moves us past pain as an abstraction and brings us to the deep concreteness of family, friendship, and memory. Informed by losses both personal and civic, Darkness for Beginners is a work of tender and exact lyricism. We live in elegiac times, through which Roderick carries a ‘full-throated light.’” 

Rick Barot, author of "Chord"

“It is clear in Darkness for Beginners that Roderick knows how deeply entwined are elegy and ode. Here, the speaker’s young daughters—thinking his horror a joke—delight at his gasp upon reading of a friend’s murder. ‘Death is deaf, / but I’m his hearing,’ a coyote chants elsewhere. With hard-won tenderness and with a skepticism honed across two previous books, Roderick both sings of and laments his days of fatherhood and forever-wars, symphony benefits and Big Tech. These poems show us how close one can get to the precipice of ennui; but they refuse both the ease of numbness and the tidiness of epiphany, wielding a refreshing self-mockery and a droll humor in order to feel, ultimately, more deeply. ‘Isn’t it absurd, // an old prince like me, / afraid of their delicate mouths?’ the speaker asks about his daughters. Absurd perhaps, in the Anthropocene, to have children, to water a lawn, to write poetry—but who would want to live in a world without them?”

Corey Van Landingham, author of "Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens"