Plasma

We will not know what it means / but we will understand’—those are the words that Plasma ends on, and it earns them with a verve that is impossibly inventive, by turns wry, melancholy, decent, hopeless, sweet, fed up, amused, and alarmed.

* David Rivard *

Plasma opens with ravishing terror: a child crying and suburban violence and the long shadows of the heart and the mind and the imagination. These poems are funny in the way that falling down is: the unexpected punctuated with, or punctured by, sudden pain. They break you up like gravity. They speed down the page and through history and across the screen. Think Frank O’Hara and Dante. Blake and Bosch. Heaven and hell. Right here. Right now.

* Paul Guest *

If everyone on the ship is dead where are you and who are you and what responsibility do you have? What kind of migratory bird are you, what kind of psychic octopus, what kind of emperor are you, what kind of son, father, citizen? Bradley Paul's poems ask these kinds of questions. You can tell the poems in this book have kept at least one person alive. You should try them to see how that works.

* Dara Wier *

There's a cosmic, loopy logic at work throughout these impressive poems, even a Zen-koan-like defiance of rationality that nevertheless seems to be digging for something more profound.

* The La