Close Quarters Review

Close Quarters is the formalist Justin Quinn’s fifth collection. He gets up close and personal with his native Ireland and adopted Prague, describes the Cold War and all the quarters of the year, and embraces the tensions of married life and parenthood . . . Deft lyrics conjoin serious content with mood music, perhaps none more so than the closing poem, ‘Elegy’, where ‘parents, lovers, sisters, brothers / are nothing but the print / they’ve left on others’ and children, initially curious about the dead, soon go back to the cartoon, or games of tag.
— Sarah Wardle, Poetry Review