Santos has written one book of prose, a collection of essays titled A Poetry of Two Minds (2000). The essays are pertinent to poetry in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but readers curious about Santos's style will be particularly interested in “Writing the Poet, Unwriting the Poem: Notes Toward an Ars Poetica.”

Santos's collection The Perishing: Poems (2003) is both mournful and political, reflecting the changed world after September 11, 2001.

C. K. Williams's poem “Elegy for Paul Zweig” has been compared with Santos's writing at about the time he wrote “Portrait of a Couple at Century's End,” both in subject matter and in treatment. It is found in Williams's Selected Poems (1994).

One of Santos's elegies in The Pilot Star Elegies is dedicated to the critic M. L. Rosenthal. Rosenthal's book Poetry and the Common Life (1974) is an influence on Santos's style...