SOURCE: A review of Brass Knuckles, in The Ohio Review, No. 25, 1980, pp. 113-19.

In the following excerpt, Saner reviews Dybek's Brass Knuckles asserting that despite unsettling subject matter, he found himself "involved."

One gathers that Stuart Dybek is younger by a good deal than either [John] Allman or [William] Dickey. Certainly his Brass Knuckles offers a collection less consistently sustained, though with plenty of compensatory energy. Since the book mixes verse and prose poems about equally it may be fair to infer that Dybek is uncertain what sort of piece he wants to write. The verse tends to focus on inner-cityscapes, while the prose poems cultivate more surreal experience not circumstantially "placed." If the latter half of Brass Knuckles goes deeper into the psyche, the fact that it is mainly prose poems may be less significant than Dybek's growing experience in his art.

Since the book's dominant polarities...