His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It's a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can't imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.

The "burst" in Ready to Burst, also announces the eruption onto the scene of one of literature's great figures [...] a magician of technique and feeling, in the tradition of a great family of writers like James Joyce, João Guimarães Rosa et Osman Lins.

Each of Frankétienne's words builds a world of which every Haitian dreams.

Frankétienne speaks like an educated man [...] but also like a friend and a citizen of the world at peace with himself and with others.

It is Frankétienne's audacity in his writing - his charming ability to calmly bring his interlocutor into his initially terrifying world [...] which makes him such an incredible writer and persona.

A Haitian novel about friendship, politics and artistic theory.... Frankétienne writes with a savage beauty about politics, art, and the roles of men and women in a turbulent world.

Ready to Burst is [...] an impressive case-study -- a novel that is 'ready to burst' yet manages still to maintain a solid enough shape for readers to readily grasp it and what its author wishes to convey, in all its messy power.

Ready to Burst marks the first, long overdue, appearance in the United States of the energetic founder of literary 'spiralism'[...] it consists of three at once intersecting and merging lives, and their single, compelling, intricately structured story is told in resourceful, oft-poetic language.

Ready to Burst is a gorgeous, explosive book filled to the brim with genius and fantasy, with surreal dreams and memories. Open it anywhere and it will astonish you.

Ready to Burst reads...with an energy akin to the charged manifestos of the Italian Futurists.

This is an amazing revelation, a deep and meaningful read, lyrical, possessed, frightening, honest, shocking and gripping. A celebration of the written word, even a celebration of single words, yes experimental in form but enlightening in structure and style.

Frankétienne’s multiple narrators [...] are vividly imaginative, especially in their telling of brief, but terrible, incidents in their lives. [...] Kaiama L. Glover, the translator of Ready to Burst, met the significant challenge of this important writer.

Kaiama L. Glover’s choice to translate—brilliantly—this particular work may be seen as a gesture toward reconnecting Spiralism with the broader literary history of the Caribbean... In this masterfully controlled chaos of a novel, the quotidian and the exceptional rub elbows—and the autobiographical is often more surreal than the fictional.