…in ten years, when the impact of Kenneth Goldsmith and Tao Lin and Steve Roggenbuck has been fully assimilated, every poet will be able to be as offhanded as Madsen is about opening a book with a retweet of Kanye West.
-MORGAN MYERS, CRITIQUE MANQUE
Hilariously dense with anxiety and loneliness
-PONCHO PELIGROSO, 2011 POET LAUREATE
I was looking forward to there being bears but there was a lack of bears. What there was, though, was an abundance of pure, unadulterated emotion … I feel like Spencer Madsen gets to the heart of what being human is.
-JUSTIN CARTER, BANANGO LIT
‘a million bears’ shows off Spencer’s knack for self-depreciating humor by compiling all his work into a single book … If you’ve followed his work, his twitter account, none of this will be shocking. What is shocking is how he hadn’t released a book until now.
-BEACH SLOTH, BEACH SLOTH
Spencer Madsen is a New York poetry bro of Woody Allen proportions. ‘A Million Bears’ is splendidly depressing but doesn’t like to dwell on that fact alone.
-HANK BARSTOW, LIT GOSSIP
i bought this book. be like me and rise above 2 the challenges that face u
-STEVE ROGGENBUCK, AUTHOR OF DOWNLOADHELVETICAFORFREE.COM
For all his attempts at unraveling the mysteries of the universe – trying to figure out what Shakespeare’s poetic significance really is, trying to express what really goes on in North Korea, trying to sum up the high-school and college experience as anything other than one hormonal fuck-up after another – he is still just like 50 Cent, just using a persona to try and get laid.
-ZACK SCHUSTER, COMPLETELYFICTIONAL.COM
while reading A MILLION BEARS i thought “a million beers” and then used a calculator to find how long it would take a human to consume a million beers if they had a six-pack every day for the rest of their life[;] it would take 456.6 years and only trees and one jellyfish species live for that long and only palm trees drink beer and they only live for about 100 years at the most and they are not humans so yeah (fuck life)
-JAMES DUNCAN, ANTIPOBRO
i read “if this is poetry then what was shakespeare doing seriously” and did a giggle[.] i felt things whilst reading the part about the laundry room and i enjoyed how it was like one never ending stream of consciousness, and when i read it i was holding my breath but i was not aware of holding my breath and i liked the way that that made me feel. i read about intimate things […] i thought about being in bed with people. i thought about eyes and hands mostly. i finished the book and thought that i would like to live inside of spencer madsen’s head but be free to move away for periods of time if i wanted to
-STACEY TEAGUE, VEHEMENT TOOLBOX
Spencer Madsen, your poems suck, though I suspect you’ve known it yourself for some time … What we have here instead is the sick, pining cry of a young man for the (many?) women who have left him. In fact, the desperation is at points so sad that it becomes comic, bathetic, as when he states “I have 250 followers on twitter surely one of you wants to date me.”
-MARIO ARIZA, YOUR POEM SUCKS
