This book is a triumph of sonic quality, line construction, and sustained attention, and Yeager's greatest achievement is getting readers to follow his example and reach inside themselves.   

                                                    - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review) 

The language of Matthew Yeager is ecstatic in the way the language of say, Walt Whitman or Kendrick Lamar is ecstatic: passionate, gregarious and so mind-bending the lines ring your head. A man shaping a planetary ball of radiant foil will bend your mind; a poem comfortable enough to ask innumerable questions without answering them will bend your mind. Yeager fills his poems with everything in the world while producing poems that are both distinctive and otherworldly. Like That is the stellar debut of an interstellar talent.

- Terrance Hayes

Matthew Yeager’s big-hearted and brilliant debut, Like That, proves the sheer capaciousness of the poetic form, pulling from what Neruda once described as “the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.” In reading these voluminous and ecstatic poems, one witnesses Yeager build the very staircases he ascends. These poems, always funny, sad, and true, are wonderfully human at their core. I urge you to make room on your bookshelf, and in your heart, for this long-awaited collection.

- Cate Marvin

The long poem as a category or genre had its heyday in the nineteenth century when Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson explored what could be done at length in verse. In more recent years our poets have tended to shy away from the demands that the long poem makes of both author and reader. Along comes Like That, Matthew Yeager’s new book, to explode that assumption and demonstrate that in the right hands, and with the right voice, the long poem has a lot of life in it. Yeager has the gift of commanding the language with the magic wand of his voice – just as a conductor waves his baton and out of seventy of more instruments come the opening notes of a symphony. Yeager thinks big, talks fast, begins with a small observation and lets it grow – or expands a simile to the point that it supplants the nominal subject, “like that.” He is inventive and fearless....This is a beautiful and irresistible book.

- David Lehman