"Watermark is like some hybrid offspring of a Tolstoy heroine and a Kerouac grin. Sean O'Reilly writes with the energetic zest of a beat poet. A born romantic about his subjects (the classics: love, sex, fear, death), he creates in Veronica a Bovary bang up to date for the digital age."

-Jimmy Fay, Artistic Director, Bedrock Theatre Company

"People who think poetry or poetically-charged prose should be all positive thoughts will have a rollercoaster ride of it here. But poetry this certainly is, and not despite but because of its earthiness, its earthedness, its refusal to look away. This short, uncomfortable, sometimes brutal, hugely important book is a triumph."

-The Irish Independent

"It hurts nicely in the head now to read Sean O'Reilly. The brain reels with impressions and evocations barely hinted at before receding in the agglutination of new ones. The temples pulse from tracing verbal hints, plot outlines and character silhouettes. The eyes strain from imagistic short phrases and headily descriptive long lines that roll on without the brakes of proper punctuation. It all amounts to a kind of you-fill-in-the-gaps vertigo generated by a devotee of innovative and complex prose who is simultaneously one of our least condescending writers. . .  a moving celebration, beyond mere exoticism, of one woman's bodily appetites. Read and reread and reach for your superlatives: in all senses, Watermark is a sheer physical experience."

-The Irish Times

"There is a cumulative, incantatory power to the sentences . . . beautifully bludgeoning language, which hammers at us and hammers, and will draw blood from any human reader."

-Keith Ridgway, author of The Parts and The Long Falling