Santos has long been admired by critics as a poet of impressive style and vision. Reviewing Santos's second collection, The Southern Reaches (1989), Christopher Buckley writes in the New Leader, “it has been a very long time since I have read a work of poetry as consciously and deftly orchestrated. . . . Santos' mastery of his craft, of form, sound and music, is astounding.” Santos's next book, The City of Women (1993), impresses critics for its ability to string together poetry and fiction in an extended meditation on a single theme. “His book is a sustained series of shimmering, shape-shifting meditations on the ways the self is one's story and one's story is always one's self,” writes Deborah Pope in the Southern Review. Publishers Weekly declares that the same collection “makes sense of the vast canvas of remembered love” and that “Santos's greatest accomplishment here is not that he provides...