You, my friend, are my idea of an ideal reader, always have been, always, that is, forever, will be.

NEWYORKER: Letters to an Editor

The ideal Ashbery reader is a foreigner or an extra-terrestrial: there can be no more liberating way of learning English than from these wacky, dandified samplings.

ECONOMIST: Modern poetry can be plaintive or richly idiomatic, or both