“WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED offers the reader elegant and ruminative poems that address birth, songs, nature, and war. I was immediately struck by the first poem of the collection introducing a character named Mathias, which opens with these lyrical fragments: ‘dark birds blazing from body very bareness stripped tree / a hole off center braves the debris.’ The author’s inventive compositions delve into the metaphysical by incorporating visual experiments and surreal images: ‘The appliances are dying, singing their choir / The shudder & glow of wires sustains my milk.’ Cross’s debut full-length poetry collection probes both the limits and potentials of exploring perception through language.”

Maw Shein Win, judge’s citation for the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Open Book Contest

“In WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED, his debut volume, Cross repeats phrases and clauses about as masterfully as Stein does in Tender Buttons, but with an altogether different effect: whereas she works repetition for rhythm, he hems his hapless protagonist, Mathias, in circles of verbal stagnation: ‘dark birds dark birds dragged on black crayon to cover dark birds . . . .’ Middle-aged and ‘round,’ Mathias is a man without Being, now that the gods have vacated it and it sits empty and has a new name: the Abyss. Cross sees little bits of paper in the air that need a jumper cable to live again. . . . Leaving Mathias behind in his own sequence, Cross goes on to other subjects with much the same ‘throaty fever.’ But he can't lie: he declares his renunciation of false consonance and elects the truth of dissonance. He's as serious about it as Schoenberg. Given the clumsiness of the soul in the absence of an absolute, the art of existence is heroic and lonely.”

Cal Bedient, author of "Candy Necklace"

“Formally inventive and peripatetic, WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED opens with Mathias—part monster, part muse. A Caliban-like, Yeatsian beast roused, Mathias signals a world where our lives and hours are no longer our own—commerce has split us from self and nature, leaving us abandoned to political neglect, climate collapse, and erasure, both personal and historical. With acrobatic lyricism, WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED stutters, repeats, and inverts, shifting sound, syntax, image, and point of view with surreal intensity. In agile poems that shimmer with fractured form like light on water, the book reinvents itself through constantly molting perspectives, from first to third person, personal to collective. Incantatory, disorienting, the book ultimately grieves a song of incompleteness, both a lament and a question: A call to action or surrender?”

Shira Dentz, author of "SISYPHUSINA"

“I'm fascinated by this book's eclectic treatment of being and transformation. Through fragmented narratives and reverie, these poems trace the enigmatic figure of Mathias, whose studies of birth, redemption, and disturbance (‘the earth is splitting apart’) unfold in dreamlike textures. In the second section, Cross crafts a landscape that is as intimate and expansive as thought itself (‘I hear emptying out / I hear breathing’). Readers, lose yourselves in these powerful ‘nerve-songs!’”

Kiki Petrosino, author of "White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia"

“A marvelous play of repetition and juxtaposition keeps the mystery of this unprecedented lyrical voice in constant motion. Cross blends startlingly unexpected phrases (‘the peacock of its bonfire’) with a sense of domesticity, even intimacy. It’s a text that’s aware of darkness and yet achieves an optimism, a tenderness that is ultimately a kind of triumph, which he not only shares with readers but makes them feel is their own.”

Cole Swensen, author of "And And And"