Bad Is Bent Good

by Dave Mehler

Bad Is Bent Good by Dave Mehler is a deeply immersive, poetic exploration of life working at a landfill in Portland, Oregon. The poems are a dynamic mixture of prose poetry, haiku, sonnets, and lyric that draw readers into the gritty, suffocating environment of the dump, portraying its workers, customers, and some of the animal inhabitants. With meticulous detail and empathy, Mehler captures the harshness of the landfill workers' lives, their resilience, and their profound humanity, portraying the characters in a raw, real way without romanticizing their struggles. While the landfill is a real place populated by garbage and the marginalized, it also becomes an abstract landscape the poet uses to explore the philosophical and metaphysical. Most of all, the landfill is a vibrant chiaroscuro-a place of despair and darkness in which the poet delves to illuminate pockets of beauty and light-making it a pertinent metaphor for the contradictions inherent in not only the human condition, but stretching figuratively even to the outer reaches of the universe.

158 pages, Paperback

Published May 27, 2025

Reviews

[Madeleine Moreland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is biased, of course, because I consider Dave family. To have this insight into the other side of his life is both sobering and touching. He works in the underbelly of overconsumption and disconnection from the impacts all our objects have on the land--at the dump--lungs full of methane, insulation fiber, trauma, and god-knows-what-else. Somehow, he makes it holy; in his noticing, beautiful. While reading his stories as prose poetry, it is clear how much he cares for people. Just as well, he is skilled at releasing them, as the gears of machinery snuff out their life on the job, or one day, they don't come back. I admire him because of his ability to see humor in the sludge of it all. And because he goes out of his way to save--or even consider--animal lives. I think he's a vegan at heart even if he won't make the necessary efforts. This is unlike most things I've read, perhaps only comparable to some prose poems by Sherman Alexie in his absurdly honest recounts.

[Anastey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Netgalley, Aubade Publishing, and Dave Mehler for sending me this advanced review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This book was so strange, but in a good way. It felt like peering inside a madman's brain. I loved every minute of it! There were times he was talking to us, and other times that sounded like a surreal junkyard prayer.

It's so hard to describe, but also impossible to put down once you start reading. I read the whole thing in a single setting, because I just could not stop.

[Kristiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting poetry collection. Mehler explores the everyday of working at a landfill site with poems and prose spanning the items that are discarded, the environmental impact of landfill sites, and the people he works with day in, day out. Consequently, Mehler's poetic range was incredibly interesting to read - from matter-of-fact prose poems that reflected the thought processes of the men he works with and the break-room philosophies, to a stunning poem about an owl regurgitating a pellet as an extended metaphor for what a landfill site represents. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mehler, Dave. Bad is Bent Good. Ashburn, VA: Aubade Publishing, 2025. This book is weird, from the title that makes no sense to me to the prose poems that don’t seem like poems. In fact, I would call this creative nonfiction, not poetry. But you won’t find anyone else writing about “the dump.” Bad is Bent Good opens the door on a world most of us prefer to pretend doesn’t exist. Mehler’s day job is driving a truck at a landfill near Portland, Oregon. He spares no sensitivities in describing the things they find there, including toxic chemicals and severed animal body parts. He does not sugar-coat the gritty circumstances of his job. In bold type at the end of one poem, “typed while standing in the porta potty urinating just before clocking out on a Wednesday.” It’s the kind of job that attracts guys desperate for whatever work they can get. We read about co-workers driving their heavy equipment while drunk or stoned on drugs and hear stories of hard lives. But there are also sweet lines, like the one about the dragonfly sleeping in the door handle of his truck. Or this: “…meadowlarks gather to go apeshit in the fields again/fly fast before my accelerating truck—first flowers yet to appear--/but spring, that mustard fever, is turning on.” The conundrum for the author, a college-educated poet who throws in bits of Greek tragedies and the Bible, is why he’s doing this work. His previous book, Roadworthy, covered his former career as a long-distance trucker. I understand wanting to stick closer to home, but the dump? [Amazon, June 28, 2025]

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disposable things, people, ecosystems.