Carl Watson, who is a Henry Darger scholar, exhibits the mind of a writer who values the kinds of literary long forms that are currently being condemned. No One’s Home is significant in the history of the long poem.
—Richard Blevins

Carl Watson is a writer who comes from the “ancient age of madness,” with his singular style and approach to the phenomenon of living. Watson’s work explores with an unrivaled intensity the essence of our common destiny. Fot those reader who really pay attention, his words are like small bombs injected in the brain and memory that we cannot defuse or neutralize. We are proud to have him in our catalog.
—Benoit Laudier, editor in chief, Vagabonde Press

Carl Watson’s writing is at once both immediate and immense, at any given moment spanning any number of realities; past, present and future, offering glimpses of ancient and eternal knowledge just within or just beyond our grasp of understanding. No One’s Home continues in this vein. With a voice akin to a 21st century Rimbaud, Watson dissects our struggle for meaning in what currently passes for the world in the form of an epic poem. Compellingly hypnotic and labyrinthine, lyrical and ominous, Watson’s work is often refreshingly hard to categorize, but always unmistakable and vital.
—William Taylor Jr., author of The People Are Like Wolves to Me

Perched on the shoulders of Frank Payne—or the narrator, or Carl Watson—sit a raven and a parrot, each resting on a collarbone: one attentive to the world’s disasters, the other to whatever comedy might still be found in the grotesque, and whatever joy in the comedy.
—Pierre Senges, En-Attendant-Nadeau

Since his first publications, Carl Watson has explored in granular form his obsessions (and ours) with stubbornness and acuity, without making any concessions, without sparring his reader, building over time a universe of shadows, cruelty, pain and lucidity.
—Catherine Dô Duc, Addict-Culture 

But to reduce Watson to his themes would be to miss the essential point. What strikes the reader first is the voice. A sinuous, free-flowing, unpredictable prose. Sentences that advance through associations of ideas, branching paths, and unexpected detours. Sentences capable of starting with a hotel room, a dog run over on a Midwestern road, a glass sitting on a counter, or a song heard on the radio, only to arrive—a few lines later—at memory, death, love, or metaphysics. With him, thought never moves in a straight line. It wanders, doubles back, deliberately loses its way, and gathers anecdotes, references, and memories along the roadside before suddenly finding its way back to the starting point. …. The humor. The erudition that never puts on airs. The fondness for digression. The ability to seamlessly blend theoretical physics, romantic memories, barroom banter, and profound metaphysical questions. For him, an idea is never abstract; it has a scent, a voice, a body, and a place where one might go for a drink.
—Gregory Rateau, Le Causer

Like his characters’ thoughts, his sentences advance through deliberate jolts and intentional snags rather than in straight lines. Each scene, reference, and digression opens onto another via a side door. Wagner leads to Dante, who gives way to a reflection on sex before veering off toward Rudy Giuliani (mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001), and so on, until the initial narrative thread is lost from sight. The characters’ memories follow suit: they arrange themselves into collages—akin to references or quotations—masking a lack, a void. …… Carl Watson pulls off a remarkable feat: transforming the lead of weary lives into literary gold.
—Nils C. Ahl, Le Monde

Fantastical realism, surrealism, expressionism, carnivalization—none of these words quite do it. Ultimately, it’s reality. At the novel’s most bizarre, there’s always something strangely familiar. . .Watson plays up the realities that haunt our fiction and the fictions that haunt our reality, compromising the integrity of the boundaries between them.
—Anitta Santiago, Tribes Magazine

Watson’s writing troubles our point of view. His vision tears itself slowly apart as the reader progresses through the novel. Sensations, illuminations, flashes of images recur, crossing the various storylines, until we find ourselves reconstituting the fragments of a different reality, another America, one we are not accustomed to.
—Patrick Amine, Art Press

[Frank] Payne is a gin mill Jean-Paul Sartre who has failed to improve himself by any of his literary aspirations.
—Kevin Reardon, Evergreen Review