Channelling Bob Dylan at his trippy, visionary best ... hits home like a punch to the sternum.
Roger Cox, The Scotsman

Moves between stabbing pain, deep melancholy and cautious optimism, always with the same gentle touch.
Ross McIndoe, The Skinny

The Good Dark takes a kind of emotional failure as its point of departure ... and makes from that first shortcoming something beautiful.
Dave Coates

This is a sorrowful but cathartic collection. The Good Dark is painted with subtle hues of emotion that lead you, unprotesting and mesmerised, into the world within.
Donald Marshall, Scottish Writers' Centre

Van Winkle’s universe is a dark one, aching with loss. In his hands, language is tense, and unstable and thrilling.
John Field, Poor Rude Lines

Poems about moving on but not forgetting the journey, about keeping eye contact with Nietzsche’s abyss when it gazes into you.
Gutter Magazine

The Good Dark has to be the ultimate break-up collection, a kind of Lonely Planet guide to Heartbreak – a land with unexpected restorative qualities.
Jon Sayers, Magma

The Good Dark so brilliantly and so often haunts us with the things half-said and unresolved.
Andrew Wells, Glasgow Review of Books

The personal and the remembered, whether true or invented, lend vibrant intimacy to these poems.
Jennifer Williams, The Bottle Imp: Best Scottish Books of 2015

Van Winkle works with the language of love and lost till it is scarcely recoverable but which still nourishes the lover's past and present. His range is remarkable: everything invokes everything else, the tactile calls in the intellectual, one poem calls in every other poem, mundane tasks call in whole physical and emotional worlds.
The Saltire Society: Poetry Book of the Year 2015

Ryan Van Winkle discusses The Good Dark with Colin Waters, Scottish Poetry Library Podcast