“What a delight to read Terence Degnan! It’s like reading the World. No, it’s like the World is reading to you.  It’s your old friend, the World, who knows everything but pretends they don’t, telling it like a story, straight up no bs with intimacy, laughter and great gobs of love.  If you don’t believe me, read ‘there is a Garden”: “I’m from a place/ where folks/ still say ‘dungarees.’””

“Among these poems that roll down the street like fast-pedaled bicycles, that speed downhill with their hands in the air on wheel-rattling bicycles, that turn corners squealing on going-home bicycles, that lie still in the yard like suddenly-dropped bicycles with no kickstands and supper almost missed, Terence Degnan slams on the brakes and looks directly at you the reader and says matter-of-factly ‘how strange/that each animal/looks about/as if to say, in the glancing/we are all alive now.’ And we are, all alive now — cheeks flushed, thighs tired, lungs burning — having ridden these ecstatic, unleashed, but still carefully wrought poems all the way home.”

“[Degnan’s poems] are simply propelled into the atmosphere urgent, heartfelt, both playful and dead serious. The contagious energy of the music hops off the page. It’s hard to keep up with the burning fuse of these lines, but well worth the effort. His dazzling imagery will send your head spinning. He’s a true original whose voice needs to be heard.”

“What if every book, story or poem ever written, every song, every film, every oil painting, every garden, every crocheted hat, every flea market find, every card, every painted fence, every ‘just saying Hi,’ every renovated room, every play, every chasm, every pantomime, every sprouted seed, and every bridge was just a way for someone to say ‘I love you’ and not be afraid of the response?”

“There are poems that rattle you and poems that soothe you, poems that scare you and poems that save you. In his lucid new collection, Terence Degnan offers us all of these kinds of poems. In a grammar that mirrors the pain—and ease!—of being, Degnan settles us and then unsettles us only to settle us again. Full, satisfying, and ultimately redeeming, Degnan reminds us not only what poetry can do but what it must do.”

“Terence’s poems don’t simply sit upon the page, waiting for you to read them; they grab you in their wind and spiral up above the earth until you are hanging with Major Tom out there in the ether, looking down upon our spinning orb with different eyes.”

“Terence Degnan’s collection, Still Something Rattles is an examination of mortality and causality and the ways in which they intertwine. These poems investigate the subtle links between our banal, everyday lives and the impact they inevitably have on those around us. There’s a logic here that’s nimble and has a light touch, which can blame the kidneys for failing to satisfactorily deal with a ninth beer, but also bear witness to the butterfly effect at work in the fallout of broken lightbulbs halfway around the world (in relation to) the moment a local boy falls in love. Since Terence is the bar’s resident poet, I would gather that alcohol played a part in these clever jumps, but I’ve talked to him stone-sober, and that’s simply the way his mind works. Every bar needs a bard, and Terence happens to be ours. We couldn’t be prouder to have him.”