"It seems most proper that The Journey to Kailash should include a poem about Jackson Pollock. Like that painter of large-scale states of mind, Mike Allen pours everything he’s got onto his poem-canvases. Mythologies, science-fiction scenarios, private memories and desires, and untestable ideas crowd and overlay one another upon the pages as if flung from an overloaded brush. Here is a vividly vertiginous collection of poems, all fun and mind-games."
— Fred Chappell
    Poet Laureate of North Carolina, ’97-’02

"Imaginative, charming, and vivid, Mike Allen's poems in The Journey to Kailash will transport you to a world where Ganesh might be your stepfather or an ATM might eat your personality, where black holes and viruses intersect with mythological characters as well as the paintings of artists like Chagall and O'Keeffe."
— Jeannine Hall Gailey
    author of Becoming the Villainess

"In his latest collection, Mike Allen brings together the epic and the commonplace, the nightmarish and the beautiful. Whether utilizing speculative or more traditional parameters, leaning towards the surreal or linear, he offers words that directly, powerfully, and originally give voice to a broad range of human experience. The Journey to Kailash is a deeply stirring and memorable book."
— John Amen
    editor, The Pedestal Magazine

"The Journey to Kailash is an exceptional collection of poetry — a gallery of the grotesque and the luminously strange . . . Whether he's painting an absurdist scene of a satyr in rut in contemporary Boston, or peeling back layers to reveal the sublimely horrific spiritual extremity of a hell-bound soul, Mike Allen's voice is nothing short of mesmerizing."
— Laird Barron
    author of The Imago Sequence

"These poems lead you down narrow alleys and beat you bruised and bloody before using your innards for auguries and making a carrion feast of your eyes. . . . It's terrifying and wonderful, and I dare you to read it."
— Amal El-Mohtar
    co-editor, Goblin Fruit

"Allen's is poetry for goths of all ages . . . a fine jobe of making the human scary and the scary human."
— The Philadelphia Inquirer