“[Gunslinger] is altogether a brilliant and strange performance, with no true parallels in American poetry, at least up until then. . . . If it's not the major 20th-century long poem a number of serious critics claim it to be . . . it's the work of a brilliant, wildly original, very funny poet firing on all cylinders.” — August Kleinzahler, New York Times Book Review
“There is nothing else like it in poetry.” — Publishers Weekly
“A dramatic poem of the first order for our day.” — Andrew Hoyem, Poetry
“One of the major North American long poems.” — Tom Raworth, The Independent
“Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes.” — Patrick McGuinness, The Guardian
“An essential piece of American literature, already, and the further we descend into an age of circuses without bread, the more poignant will be our Slinger’s aim on the true heart of the West.” — Matthew Sirois, New York Journal of Books
"If poetry is news that stays news, Gunslinger tells you what the news feels like when language has lost all grip on reality, 'like trying to read a newspaper/from nothing but the ink poured into your ear.' If poetry tends to find its own moment, then Dorn may finally be due his." — Andre Naffis-Sahely, Poetry
“This is a jokey poem, high-spirited and good-tempered, carried forward on a steadily inventive play of puns and pleasantries.” — Donald Davie
“Gunslinger is perhaps the most important poem of the last half of the twentieth century.” — James K. Elmborg
“An immense bundle of swift-moving fun from the beginning. . . . But the underlying spirit of it is immensely entrepreneurial and buccaneering and disrespectful and altogether a kind of advanced parody of the whole business of episodic serial writing (the fabular and fabulous in the fable). The entire American adventure is laid out there with great wit and humour.” — J. H. Prynne
“Slinger is a swiftly rendered torrent of metaphors about this place. Its identity, its fakery, its malice. Slinger is a whole questioning of every part of ourselves. From that early winsome lyricism about the West, Dorn has constructed a grand anti-lyric about the West of our fantasy and of its own reality.” — Amiri Baraka
“Let me be among those who acclaim Gunslinger as one of the poems of the era, of the one we are going into, or the era Gunslinger begins to create for us.” — Robert Duncan
“An important turning point in American poetry.” — Marjorie Perloff, from the Introduction