Chains & Mirrors won the 2006 Randall Jarrell Prize and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award(Best Collection by a North Carolina Poet.)

"It's easy to see why Alex Grant's chapbook Chains & Mirrors won both the 2006 Randall Jarrell/Harperprints Poetry Contest and the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award (for best book by a North Carolina poet). Grant's skill as a poet goes beyond just writing well. Although his images are fresh, his language precise and his lines masterfully crafted, Grant's knowledge of and respect for the history of his craft make him not just a good new poet, but as Thomas Lux says in his review of Chains & Mirrors, "a hell of a good new poet."

JoSelle Vanderhooft, in The Pedestal Magazine

I am a great admirer of Alex Grant's poems for their keen, intimate seeing and inventive juxtapositions ( A wedge of salted cantaloupe / sinking in blue agave) and for their astonishing metaphors (Grief is a silk neckerchief covering a burn / around the throat, holding sound /down in the body). Intellect and imagination are sophisticated twins in these perceptive, witty, moving poems."

- Susan Ludvigson.

"Chains & Mirrors is a powerful and stunningly imaginative book that announces a hell of a good new poet!"

- Thomas Lux

"One of my greatest beliefs is that there is still mystery in this world, and that poetry - its vowels and syllables, its images - can embody our world's enduring mysteries, if not(heaven forbid!) explain them. Alex Grant's poetry confirms my belief. These are poems for our time that, like our most cherished mysteries, will endure beyond our time."

- Martin Lammon, editor, Arts & Letters

"Chains & Mirrors is consistently well-crafted, lyrical, vigorous and yet delicate. The diction is rich and unique; the cut to the lines is artful."

- Marilyn Kallet, Final Judge.