Every detail is interesting in Kimberly Campanello's An Interesting Detail, that's the irony . . . A thoroughly unexpected book, employing archival, archaeological and linguistically innovative concepts . . . in individual poems rooted in their own intimately attuned worlds

Tom Branfoot, POETRY SALZBURG REVIEW

Campanello takes a quasi-archaeological approach to past and present in these grounded yet transportive poems. The Irish-American poet has a gift for drawing inventive, unexpected connections between objects and their meaning, be that historical or transitory, and the results will reward your time and re-reading

Maria Crawford, FINANCIAL TIMES, Best Summer Books 2025

Fierce, breathless, seducing the ear by rhythmic propulsion and monosyllabic control, and all while teetering on the blurred boundary between short story and prose poem . . . She meditates on power, the environment, writing, and questions the supposedly redemptive power of chronic pain . . . The opening gambit reveals a poet disenchanted with – or perhaps no longer satisfied by – poems situated in the stratosphere, amid “church” or “cathedral bells” ringing, nor in the dark, indescribable mystery that is “beneath the sea”. Campanello's poetics are startlingly inventive, even as she admits “books don't know what's inside their covers, or they don't care”. This is a work to care about

Oluwaseun Olayiwola, GUARDIAN

One of the many joys of An Interesting Detail is how the poet takes us with her across spatial and temporal distances, acting as guide, confidante, record-keeper, and perhaps most strikingly, embodying a kind of monument herself. Campanello is a fiercely intelligent poet, a serious poet, but not an unplayful one. Across the book's engagements with poetic archaeology and historic constructions, she is clearly playing on the Latinate associations of her own name with bells and towers, while also drawing on a long (pre)history of the poet as seer, as truth-teller . . . This is Campanello's gift: to transport us into realms that dwell in the folds between history and imagination, to point at the purled details of their fabrication, and to ask What does this mean to you? To us?

POETRY IRELAND REVIEW

Expansively intelligent, pained, persisting, spectacular, this collection rises out of the depths, from the “echoes and the afterthoughts”, at the uncanny intersection of memory and history

FRAN LOCK

What's interred is not resting. Campanello pulls at every detail to disarm, discern and dismantle pieties and imprecisions, encouraging us to dig deep into subtleties

SO MAYER