"In a debut of prose poems that approach language by turns as abstract or as deeply representational, interdisciplinary artist and writer Russo chronicles a desire for calm and unattachment in the face of the details of a life—a volatile relationship, the labor of gardening, a “Nervous disorder.” The poems on the right-facing pages feel as if they have fallen from the spaces in the more fragmented poems of the left. As Russo writes, “Some things drop down into what space is cleared for,” before revising this sentiment when she writes later, “What we continue to clear is G.” Readers will likely find the primary pleasures of this book in this tension, as philosophy emerges from fracture and the poems gesture toward but never perform wholeness."

—Publishers Weekly

“Few long poems have so completely fit Auden’s description of a successful short one: a clear expression for mixed feelings. With its terse lists, visual and typographical play, half-erased words, and one-word metaphors, Russo’s poem lives up to her description of her psyche as an ‘oversized book, a city block, mathematics, blue and black scarf // Earth’s eccentricity, spiral jetty, a campsite, craters on Mercury.’ You could call Wave Archive a project book, if you like, but you could equally well call it a deconstructed memoir, or a set of sketches towards unwritten essays in verse. Mixed genres have rarely sounded so good, or described an idiosyncratic life so well.” — The Yale Review