“What a force-field combo. In poetry’s harmonic mind-word convergence! Sharing the stage and the light many years, it’s wonderful to have these longtime catalysts in the maelstrom-panic-‘punketry’ of these edgy apocalyptic times. Both raw and intimate, their granular images and personal sound. I love the ‘jagged telegram’ of Mike Watt’s passion and Thurston Moore’s lyrical assured structures. All of this from the heart and the lives. A welcome ignited dynamics. Both seeing and feeling lyrics as tough, confessional, vernacular, and speech-based. The ‘experimental prosody of rock’ for this special category and lineage of genius troubadour expression.”
—Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia

“Tuff Gnarl, Part 2 is a full-volume detonation that lives in the charged space where poems and songs start to blur. In this electrified exchange, Thurston Moore and Mike Watt tear into language with the same ferocity they’ve brought to stages for decades, forging poems that riff, collide, and burn with raw intelligence. These pieces swagger with punk nerve and deep literary instinct, channeling the spirit of Sonic Youth and Minutemen while carving out something wholly their own. This is poetry as feedback, as friendship, as fearless improvisation—loud, alive, and fully amped.”
—Peter Gizzi, author of Fierce Elegy

“It’s a little witchy, and she knows when to stop, I mean this scene altogether, these two men, the poem looking over its shoulder at some other guys, it’s kinda funny and then it’s all headlines and Watt includes himself in it and he refers to Thurst’s town, London, maybe, it’s all in a song I think, I just noticed they’re numbered, all of them, but ‘where’s rachel, weeping for her children?’ is a very great end, so open this book and read to it.”
—Eileen Myles, author of a “Working Life”

“To live so long and see so much, to carry the weight of memory over so many miles, the strength required to put it onto the page—this is the work. Thurston and Mike do it very well. They always do. They keep watch.”
—Henry Rollins