If poetry is a slow drink, a cocktail, this year I found Luke Beesley's New Works on Paper rinsing my frontal lobe like a well made martini. Language is made deliciously strange under the pressure of Beesley's pencil, in poems that get "caught in your / eye like a coin at the bottom of a public pool".

Books of the Year, The Australian, Jaya Savige

Beesley is a serious worker of image and syntax, brilliantly pushing at the possibilities of the quotidian, and of the sentence, which we follow with a sense that meaning is an image: a not quite linear, yet not quite escaping, butterfly. Quietly, surprisingly, poems occur. The judges found Aqua Spinach a unique and unusual work, at the forefront of what is becoming a predominant experiment of Australian literature: the writing of prose poems.

ALS Gold Medal judges (2019)

We might as well ask if our lives are titles for our dreams. Beesley's poems continually challenge normative ways of thinking about language: the two poems just mentioned end, respectively, thus: "one of the workers sleeps in a cupboard simile" and "fling a few words into the trees." The narration, rather than merely reporting thought, or representing reality, is as in the mix as Beesley can get it, bending sentences like Aphex Twin bends tunes.

The Australian, Michael Farrell

In Luke Beesley's case, contrarily, what looks like a wildly surreal accumulation of moments and wordplay pops out its extrusions of clarity like some poetic 3D printer. Ekphrasis is triumphantly reinstated, because for each iteration, while the idea of it is hard to encompass, the object is undeniably there. Beesley ranges across every kind of modern culture, from cinema (Malick, Lynch, Wenders); to music (lo-fi genius Bill Callahan); writing - Joyce, O'Hara, Tagore; and art - a lovely riff on Marcel Duchamp called 'Nude descending a Solo' ...

Australian Book Review, Peter Kenneally

In this boisterous follow-up to Melbourne artist, musician and poet Beesley’s 2013 collection New Works on Paper (mostly American) poets, painters, actors, musicians, film-makers and others mingle in a quotidian penumbra of breakfast cereal and public transport.

The West Australian by William Yeoman

One wonders what world of bridging words has been erased between what appears on the page. You can either dwell slowly on each word, as though each was a pillar, imagining what once lay in the chasms between—or you can slide along and focus only on the musicality.

Red Room Company, Emma Rose Smith

Beesley’s images are startling and surreal. They suggest how an image can be an instance of interpretation and apprehension, an object not captured, but remade...

Cordite Poetry Review by Ella O'Keefe

Beesley courts an elliptical harmony that lets the sense make sense of itself. Moments are refined until they slip through their own transformative meaning…As a response to India, Balance is remarkably restrained. The poems are clean distillations of what must have been a sensory overload. Like a good photographer, the trick seems to be to notice while not being noticed.

Southerly, Nathan Shepherdson

Beesley’s voice in Balance carries us in tangential directions of thought; his language wondrously circumferential and interrupted as image after image turns the process of mimesis...He avoids the temptation of collaging India as a watershed between east and west...Beesley rewrites a language of language about India in a rhetoric of performance that is both poised and rich so that ‘Tourists the word so viscous it was spit.’ returns meaning to that clichéd encounter.

Michelle Cahill, Westerly

What I find most intriguing about this book is the sense I get of a magical Brisbane – nothing to do with the Courier Mail, Peter Beattie, the Gold Coast and whatever else people not from there think of when they think of Brisbane – and instead all about films, books, coffee and lovers. These poems are letters from that place. What is lasting about these poems is their faith in the redemptive power of art, in the pleasures of work, and the connections they make between the processes of thinking, looking, reading, and writing.

Tim Wright, Cordite Poetry Review

From the first page of this book, it is evident that we are in the presence of a modest, acutely sensitive and deeply compassionate poet, whose undoubted powers of expression and clarity of vision are equally matched.

Patricia Prime, Stylus Poetry Journal

Luke Beesley’s book may well turn out to be, in retrospect, one of the most ambitious books of recent Australian poetry.

Martin Duwell, Australian Poetry Review

[Beesley] is a poet with an essentially lyric touch, a great sense of surprise and timing, and a voice that seems increasingly sure of where it is going. More than a poet to watch: this is a poet already out there and revelling in it.

The Australian, Thomas Shapcott

His words often take you on surreal paths of flight, shaping into strange and self-referential swirls, leaving you disoriented but transformed.

Cordite Poetry Journal by Jessica Wilkinson

There are fibre-optic shifts in thought. Light that transmits what the reader cannot necessarily see. In another sense, there are very skillful jump-cuts, not digital ones, but blade cuts more akin to French sound art of the 50s. The reward is not to know where the incision is because the thought has already grown over it to conceal the evidence.

Southerly by Nathan Shepherdson

The wry humour and often unexpected descriptions and images in Beesley’s ‘New Works on Paper’ offer much for different levels of readers.

Rabbit Poetry Journal, Siobhan Hodge

Luke Beesley is clearly a great talent at subtle poetic imagery, a master of the cropped prism-like phrase. He is always cinematic, photographic, a divider of scenes into moments that come to life through poetry, they dazzle, vibrate and stay.

Jacket Magazine, Christopher Barnes

I can open this book at pretty much any page and such treasures will come tumbling out.

Bluepepper, Justin Lowe