“Drawing on influences both obscure and mainstream, antiquated and contemporary, the collages and collage poems in Lake Antiquity mix unassuming, bluntly adorned imagery with painstaking technique and obsessive source-material selectivity….The result is a highly approachable aesthetic, that is both elusive and disarmingly appealing; flat, yet mind-bendingly far-reaching in its treatment of historicity and permutational formations of meaning…beautifully flawed dreamscapes.”—Ben Mirov, Bomb

“Of course, these materials have been sliced, diced, and adorned with found texts to create the piquant verbal-visual juxtapositions we expect from the collagist: Against a powder-blue sky, a biplane dives in to a dogfight, bracketed above and below by a slyly referential poem: “the inner history of the spectators was / so apparent on his face / you get different kinds of handwriting / in the line of the roadway / or the right way made for the open door / to the stark amazement and horror of all.” Downing has sequenced his collages with cinematic pacing; you fly through these pages as you might in a dream.”—Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

“Why, you can barely walk across the street without tripping over some Victorian scientist or kindly sports celebrity who can’t wait to explain to you the intricacies of fissile atoms or sex customs amongst the Pruni Amygdali, a certain genus of fruit-bearing tree. Indeed, with frothy weather systems to spare and profound respect for the post-industrial parade event, Lake Antiquity is sure to delight and amaze even the most jaded connoisseur of print ephemera…Debunking once and for all the notion that canoes cannot be propelled into interstellar flight by the swift current at the top of a raging Canadian waterfall, Downing proves himself the eagle-eyed master of the twin spirits of inductive reasoning and intuitive montage.”—Lucy Ives, Tarpaulin Sky

“Lake Antiquity makes it clear that Downing is a genius of juxtaposition. He rubs elements together that were never intended to meet. When you read it as one work—nonsense verse, photo collage, pop-culture references, and all—you realize that Downing is working on maybe the most ambitious memoir you've ever seen; he's telling us about the world by remaking the world in his own image.”—Paul Constant, The Stranger