The poet cites the following works as inspiration:
Franz Kafka, The Trial, Diaries 1910-1923
Rainier Maria Rilke, Rodin
Paul Ricoeur, On Interpretation
Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations
Giorgio Agamben, Nudities
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Terayama Sh¿ji, The Labyrinth and The Dead Sea: My Theatre
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory
Maeda Ai, Text and the City
E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered
Marjorie Perloff, The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations
Tilman Osterwold & Thomas Knubben, Emil Nolde: Unpainted Pictures
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
Hijikata Tatsumi, Yameru Mai-hime
Yoshioka Minoru, Umayahashi Nikki
Kobayashi Toshiaki, Shutai no Yukue


Norman Fischer writes this about Eric Selland's OBJECT STATES:
"No object that isn't a state of mind or being, no state of mind or being that doesn't appear as an object, an event, a thought, a phrase. This haunting philosophical impasse and delight is the subject of Eric Selland's quietly beautiful book in which nearly every echoing sentence invites pondering. 'The poet screaming inside a fish.' 'A day which is merely a symptom.' Do you know where or who you are?"

- NORMAN FISCHER

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa writes this about Eric Selland OBJECT STATES:
"Eric Selland finds 'invisible doors' in spaces we did not know existed but are pleased to meet. 'Language is a city' both east and west and at once familiar and unfamiliar in 'the absent presence of memory.' A fine

work both haunting and revelatory from one of the most skillful of contemporary poets."

- JANE JORITZ-N