It all makes for a quite fascinating double-work, Responses • Kafka's Prague offering insight into a remarkable artist as well as a striking set of examples of his visual work. The Twisted Spoon Press edition is, like all their books, a beautiful volume, too – this is a lovely book.

— M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review

Putting the two halves of the book together, one could say that Responses introduces the reader to a theory of poetry and art in interaction, at least insofar as anything like a theory can be abstracted from Kolář’s fragmented commentary. Subsequently, in Kafka’s Prague, we are offered the chance to see that theory put into practice by a master practitioner using one of his favourite techniques. The book as a whole seems to invite its readers to judge for themselves not just how effective such juxtaposition of word and image may be but also what kind of effects it might generate when transposed into a different cultural context.

— Alena Dvořáková, Dublin Review of Books

”Kafka’s Prague” is an entertaining and thought-provoking sequence, with deconstructed and re-imagined buildings, reproduced in full colour, opposite brief and elusive fragments from Kafka, often to do with death, dreams and confusion. But it is “Responses” that has enthralled me.

— Rupert Loydell, Tears In the Fence

It has a thoughtful, conversational, musing-out-loud sort of feel and a sense of direction that is not explicit or artificial but gives the work a natural flow. From the outset, Kolář makes it clear that he sees art as part of the “general drive toward universal knowledge” and as such there can be nothing extrinsically new that is not a departure from that which is already innate to the practice. Art and literature are disciplines that do not create anything new so much as they create new ways of looking at (and using) what is already there, a “special type of perception.”

— roughghosts

This is to be recommended for admirers of A User’s Manual, Kolář’s jaunty set of suggestions for artistic procedures, brought out in English by the same publisher and translator in 2019.

— Michael Caines, TLS

In extending the techniques and topics of the past to match the contingencies and urgencies of the present Kolář felt as if neither images nor words by themselves was enough [...] One of those methods – “crumplage” (crumple + collage) — involved taking found images from books and newspapers and altering them. The impulse for this was beyond producing Dadaist or Surrealist pictures but was intended to convey senses of loss and beginnings.

— Tom Bowden, Book Beat