"When I get rich I'll get a pied-a-terre on Yuriy Tarnawsky's planet. It’s very wild on the surface and cool and calm in the interior. The palm fronds don’t decay."
— Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems
"Tarnawsky’s are the second opinions we seek, almost recognize, then do, for they are made of the sounds, power sources, bizarre jobs, people coming our way, fitted together both by us and a culture by turns demanding and uncaring if we sleepwalkers notice or not: alarming, intelligent, caught again and again in the grasp of the author's surprise and yearning."
— Joseph McElroy