Joel M. Toledo’s Planet Nine ends with this line: “I know now what to make of my life.” That’s a bold statement to make, but this collection explores how poetry is made to grapple with the everyday and renders the ordinary mysterious. With references to pop music, literary theory, Eastern mysticism, history, and the news, Planet Nine has some of the finest lines I’ve read in a long while, a reckoning with “the old world gone with its alchemies and sepias,” where names are “now a grief that must be respected.” Toledo makes good on his promise that poetry, like the hypothetical planet in our system that is both vast and small and knowable and enigmatic, is “about willing something into existence.”
— Eric Gamalinda

We hypothesize the existence of beauty when we read a poem the way astronomers have hypothesized a hidden planet in the far-flung spaces of the solar system. Some of us find it, and some of us go on rifling through the next book. We expect colluding elements in both verse and atmosphere to spark metal, rock, and magic—and where astronomers must continue to do their work, we find snatches of our beauty in Planet Nine.
— Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

Joel M. Toledo tells us that monks overcome fear by meditating on stones. The poet’s subject is healing. The book’s title refers to a planet at the edge of our solar system ten times the size of earth. The poet’s subject is gravity. Fittingly, Toledo’s poems aspire to elevation at an exponentially planetary scale, propelled by a deep belief that art might fill some of the painful distance down to the smallest, most gorgeous fissures. Planet Nine is a book of impressive formal range, not to mention a sensibility that is cosmopolitan and cosmic.
— Patrick Rosal