“There are books that stain you long after you put them down. In the Good Years is one of these books; it haunts you, in the best ways, with its flea-ridden dogs, summers steeped in the self-knowledge of girlhood and honeybees and vexed familial lineages, the profound and profoundly painful moments of lives lived, shared, and shed. It’s not hyperbolic (I hope) to say that the whole world is here—but unlike the actual world, Cresté’s is cradled in pristine care, attention, and with language so deft and exact, it could have only been made.”

— Ocean Vuong

“In the Good Years offers a stunning archaeological dig of language, time, and intimacy. Cresté’s poems excavate tenderness and violence, the personal and the political, ecosystems and their destroyers, treasure and trash, history and the multiverse of futures contained therein. Each poem is a site of meticulous, gentle sifting, each line a careful curation of artifacts. Cresté’s radical attention unearths and re-earths, restoring context to its discoveries and finding homes for the unhomed. Breathtaking.”

— Tess Gunty

“In In the Good Years, Laura Cresté forges a speaker attuned to historical and familial forces—a speaker ravenous for communion, a speaker who notices the distance between people, the gaps in history. Moving from childhood to adulthood, these poems radiate with a translucent interiority. I could feel the speaker’s emotional and intellectual growth, setbacks. Each experience, each glimpse of the world is rendered in precise and resonant language. In the poems that hold the dead and disappeared in Argentina, Cresté deftly braids familial narratives, political violence, translation, guilt, and survival into a tour de force that jolts the senses. Laura Cresté is a remarkable poet. I’m thankful for her first book.”

— Eduardo C. Corral

“‘Airplanes from opposite windows in their twin beds.’ ‘Bright smear across spoiled film,’ with ‘no / choice left but to let the lit world in.’ ‘The sea out of the sea.’ Debts. Dan’s drunk driving. Egg sandwiches, “fur stuck to my tongue,” a good boyfriend who enjoys ‘that poem / you wrote about your ex.’ An entire alphabet of the apparently ordinary made into lines that stand out like split geodes, from girlhood to quarter- or third-of-life crises, from ‘jelly shoes and jelly sandwiches’ all the way up—or down—to wars and whales, ‘water welling gutters,’ and years lost to health rollercoasters and generic Zoloft—here is a whole life that some of us recognize, portrayed in sonic palettes that never tire and rarely even repeat, and sparkle, and shine. If Laura Kasischke has an heir, she’s here, making do, throwing dodgy parties, converting demons into tentative friends with melodic hexameters or deviled eggs. Here, too, are the family legacy of Argentine rulers’ cruelty, the ordinary harm of patriarchy, lemons and oranges, love of one kind and love of another, and memory, memory, Argentina, New Jersey, basement floods, supermoons. Here we are, and by we I mean the poet and me and you, any of you. Join us there.”

— Stephanie Burt