Gritty and lyric, Bourgeois's writing entwines the earthy particulars
of a remembered rural south, with surrealist dream images. His dark
wit employs vernacular and mythic motifs to create an original universe. His is a voice to watch for in American poetry.

—Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred

Bourgeois is a major ‘French' voice in American letters.

—Ernest Hekkanen, The New Orphic Review

Bourgeois's fragments explore the extremities of the creative act, with both brilliance and an implosive setting-awry of the very notion of the poetic art, which is here cast as a revelatory performance art of words – ‘everything is legal now', with the ash-strewn gestures of concentration-camp or genocidal erasure compacted with the absurd futility of social and political designs and narratives.   This poetry is denuded and lavishly stripped to the bone:   primed for impacts on its spectators' eyes.  

—Stephen Barber, author of Blows and Bombs and The Art of Destruction   

Bourgeois's ‘Askesis' is a sort of time-warp—a return to the Surrealist games of random association and the juxtaposition of wildly unrelated images to create a new poetic whole.   But where the Surrealist experiments were for the most part unreadable, Bourgeois's brief prose poems carry a sinister force that keeps you reading.

—Ruth Brandon, author of Surreal Lives