The book is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and is lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism". Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguable its most famous and is usually cited as one of the quintessential pieces of Cubist literature. While it has been praised for its avant-garde approach at portraying the mundane, it has also been criticized as "a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax.