Classical Chinese poetry can hit like a hallucinogen. Evidence suggests Jeff Russell never quite recovered. From his attempt to translate Wang Wei’s Deer Park comes this flashback, an extraordinary, polyvocal baroque fantasia on what has become, in Russell’s capacious, dramatic, driven, acoustically precise imagination, an ever-unfolding visionary cosmos where we take solace and pleasure from voices at the outer edge of cognition. Who are we hearing? Lovers? Children? The dead? The yet to be born? California surfers waiting for the wave they will ride out into intergalactic space? "By The Time This Reaches You" is a complex and marvelous poem, by turns prophetic and poignant. In reading it, in imagining the sound of it, we take up with a mysterious collectivity travelling back, into, and through the deepest recesses of myth and song. —JOSEPH DONAHUE