"Carl Hancock Rux's 'Talk', a parody of a panel discussion, tackled racial paradoxes with refreshing zeal, following its multiracial academic characters on a wild-goose chase as they try to pin down the identity of an enigmatic black writer."

Village Voice

"Talk is the most intellectually ambitious play in years. It wins the case for a renewed theatre of ideas."

Time Out

"Mr. Rux has a fertile imagination and exceptional talent."

Wall Street Journal

"A dazzling play. Mr. Rux's ideas have the urgency and passion of actions. He draws on satire, rhetoric, naturalism (the kind that Strindberg said 'seeks out the points where great battles take place') and poetry."

New York Times

"Carl Hancock Rux's riveting off-Broadway 'Talk,' (is) an ambitious play of ideas...Rux's intellectual tour de force, (is) a formidably erudite and eloquent meditation on the strife between art and politics, race and reason. (Rux) courageously mixes experimental theater, Greek choruses, jazz-like rhetorical improvisation, post-structuralist theory, hip-hop and popular culture into a heady brew of critical reflection on Western intellectual life over the last 70 years. My brain teemed days after I left the theater."

Micheal Eric Dyson, author of "Open Mike; Reflections on Philosophy, Race, Sex, Culture and Religion"

"Carl Hancock Rux wields words as swords to provoke, tease, challenge, assault, and surprise... His poems are incredibly tender and speak to a community that is brilliantly colorful and seriously inclusive."

Jill Nelson, author of "Straight No Chaser"

"Rux's use of language is dazzling, voraciously open to the world... His poetry is primal scream in eclectic verse...Pagan Operetta is filled with verbal shape-shifting...a funky fairy tale about turning away from a system of belief and chasing the pulse of mortality...As derrick Walcott remade Homer's Oddessey in Omeros, Rux refashions Sophocles' Oedipus using the shards of his life to update the myth...shaking out a polyphony of voices knee deep in debris. Rux is a cultural maelstrom...a voice of profane brilliance."

Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Dense, funny, lyrical and profane--Carl Hancock Rux's Pagan Operetta is an urban brew that absolutely lives up to its name."

Jessica Hagedorn, author of "The Gangster of Love"

"PAGAN OPERETTA is a brilliant and provocative debut collection that excites and demands to be read."

Sapphire, author of "Push"

"The poems of Hancock Rux revel in our lives and the sweet dreams we make out of them. They are paeans to lust, sin, shame and reckless abandonment. All the colors of the world as they appear to orphans of the storm. Prayers for the dying, love for the damned, the different and unrepentantly beautiful."

Greg Tate, author of "Flyboy in the Buttermilk"