In the short time since Carson's Men in the Off Hours has been published, most critics have praised it. In a review of the book for Booklist, Donna Seaman calls Carson, "brilliant and irrepressible." In his review of the book for The Kenyon Review, David Baker calls Carson "Canada's most progressive poet in many decades. She is like a performance artist on paper, with that kind of adventurous chutzpah, as hyper as she is brilliant." Ann K. van Buren of Library Journal calls the book "a cryptic narrative written in a flourishing language that invites the reader to start decoding." This cryptic quality, which requires Carson's readers to dig into her poems to find their meaning, is one of the poet's many hallmarks. Steven Marks says, in his entry on Carson for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: "Movement toward meaning that partially reveals and then hides...