…[The Tallest Building in America] meshes the personal with the political, zooming in and out from microcosm to macrocosm… Highlights include ‘Texting the Beloved’ which is a fantastic mishmash of registers, and ‘Sélection de Vin de Proprietaires [sic]’ which charmed me with this line: ‘The pigeons are fat oboes, the cathedral thinks it’s a dove.’ For those who’ve been following all these reviews, you’ll notice that I’m appreciating it in spite of Paris poems being a personal pet peeve of mine.
I guess I’m in love.
— Claire Trévien, Sabotage Reviews
Throughout The Tallest Building in America, Jaswinder Bolina weaves lyric incantations. “I’ll be dead in Chicago in 1978 / and dead in Paris in 1938 and dead in Aleppo in 2013,” he says in “Second Variation on a Theme by Cesar Vallejo”; and, in “Texting the Beloved,” “but I don’t pull over I go / faster past radar patrols and dashboard cams past local law / and local trooper and those sexless analysts at the NSA.” His poems have an uncanny ability to be both public and personal simultaneously, concerned with everyone or just you, and that’s a terrific achievement.