From the Introduction by Frank Lima

"Vincent Katz has a clear, effortless voice that assumes no other voice. His poems reflect a profound intelligence beneath the surface. Their dark elegance is the mysterious thread to the reader's imagination. A lesser poet's style attempting such lyricism would usually settle for a vapid form that would assume the falsehood of "poetic emotion."

"Form is what maintains a poet's emotions at his or her controlled disposal, sustaining the accumulation of a body of work like Ashbery's or Koch's. Both are contemporary examples of the process of cool deliverance. What's remarkable about Vincent's poems is their purity and observation and what would appear on the surface to be simple. These poems are the inner black and white photos of an urban American poet who travels from New York to ancient Rome at the drop of his poetic will."

"Understanding Objects is a magnificent prodigious tome! Vincent Katz's poems have a terrific human stride to them - elegant, assured, sensual, intelligent, erudite, hip. It's a passionate love affair with the phenomenal world and with all its detailed "isness" which includes not only objects, but friendships, musics, places, languages - that rivets one. I'm in love with HIS optimism. This is a book for the next century. I'm amazed by its beauties."

"In the curious timelessness of time, this writing makes a golden space of thought and echo, days of edges and sunlight, the warmth of just one and one. Vincent Katz pays a useful and particular attention to all that has come his way."

"Vincent Katz's poems have a dashing sensuousness, a reality and an immediacy that, combined with their great but lightly worn literary sophistication, give them their exhilarating quality of always seeming concrete and true. They represent a new turn in the poetry of everyday experience, as it was reinvented for our time by such poets as Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler."

"Vincent Katz's poetry evokes a city of the senses, whatever its locale, with a New Yorker's unceremonial zeal. He loses his luck on Argentinienstrasse; he strolls alongside "private lives lined with trees" and candidly observes the foliage. With impromptu care, Katz beautifully marks these places, heeding the "little blurt of a day" in his consciousness before it can drift past. Lile a lyric fellow traveler of Ginsberg, Ashbery, and O'Hara, he eavesdrops on an urban, human "whirl of volubility" and porously translates it."

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He has published several books of poetry in collaboration with artists, including A Tremor In The Morning (with linocuts by Alex Katz, 1986, Peter Blum Edition), New York Hello! (1990, Ommation Press) and Boulevard Transportation (1997, Tibor de Nagy Editions), both with photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, and Pearl (with paintings by Tabboo!, 1998, powerHouse Books). Forthcoming is Voyages/Hyde Park Boulevard, an artist's book in two volumes done in collaboration with James Brown. In 1998, he curated the first museum retrospective of the work of Rudy Burckhardt for IVAM in Valencia, Spain, and in 2000 he is co-curating, with Lynn Gumpert, Rudy Burckhardt And Friends: New York Artists Of The 1950s and 1960s for the Grey Art Gallery in New York. He has written the essay and interview for Life Is Paradise (1999, powerHouse Books), the first study of Francesco Clemente's portraits. In 1995, he published Charm (Sun and Moon Books), a translation from Latin of the first book of poems of Sextus Propertius, and he is currently translating the remaining poems by Propertius.