Ron Loewinsohn quotes:

Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake.

It's just this epidemic unimportance, this pervasive feeling that just about everything is "no big deal," that drives these ordinary people to those fast-food joints, there to try to fill with carbohydrates the spiritual and emotional emptiness gnawing inside them.

Most of the people are no thicker than Formica, yet they hunger obscurely for some continuity with the place and with each other.