-James Najarian, author of The Goat Songs

Jeffrey Franklin offers serious, nuanced, and often playful meditations on . . . what it is to be human in beautiful formal verses that make delicious use of our rich English word-hoard at every turn. It is the record of an intelligent quest for authenticity, and for how one manages "Living Right" at this particular moment in time.

-Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip, New and Selected Poems

In Where We Lay Down, the poet's attention, like light-dapples, passes from parent to spouse to warfare to porcupine, transporting readers through a vivid past into an endless present. . . . though it is mid-morning, Franklin writes in "Autumnal Equinox," the sun, / scattering its shipwreck's coins / on the sea-bottom beneath the crabapple, // shines with that dreamy quality of light / I know mid-afternoon will match precisely: / resolution balancing expectancy. It's a fitting coda for a powerful volume in which air merges with water, earth reveals itself as the once and future seafloor, treasure is born of terrible wreckage, and mid-morning is already mid-afternoon. This is a book of incantation and connection, offering both treasure and a hope of equinoctial balance.

-Catherine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars

Jeff Franklin's poems are brilliantly achieved and speak to us from a mind and heart that deeply know and feel the dimensions of the human condition - its capacity for empathy, joy, and inevitably, sorrow and loss. His poems help defend us against these aspects of mortality, making time our ally while we read, leaving us with a new hope alive in language.

-James Applewhite, author of Time Beginnings