-Manzano's poems go beyond the traditionally circumscribed lyric, beyond the often humble and household range of so many contemporary poems. Translating those poems, and talking with Manzano about his work, was to experience that energy and ambition at close range, too close indeed to avoid being affected by it permanently. Manzano offers one of the great gifts of translation--to be changed oneself in the process of that other, impossible change: moving a poem out of one language into another.---Steven Reese

The poems in Synergos smack of Whitman. They outsoar anything...