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Plasma
The poems in Plasma , Bradley Paul’s third book, use common objects, animals, people, and experiences as starting points to consider one’s connectivity to the world. Riddles and obituaries alternate with rants and memories of things that never existed or that the speaker has never seen – or that he has, and struggles to remember. The title is inspired by all our conceptions of an infinitely conductive state of matter in which the many disparate parts act collectively to create a single, ever-shifting whole. The part of the blood that communicates and provides. The ethereal medium by which we watch thousands of electronic images, sounds, and stories.
88 pages, Paperback
Published October 16, 2018
9 people want to read
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October 30, 2018
What a delightful, remarkable book. I can’t remember a book of poetry that made me laugh out aloud as often as this one did — comedy is so hard to pull off in poetry, truly — and yet never once feel hammy or trite. These are poignant poems full of sadness and longing for a world we almost live in, and would, if we weren’t so good at fucking it up.
In poems that recall the best of Charles Simic, James Tate, and Wislawa Szymborska, Paul expertly walks the elusive line between sadness and hilarity, and his poems have a way of making you feel suddenly jolted awake to the world around you. He is an immensely gifted poet who has figured out how to touch the deepest darkness with the lightest hand, and this is his best book yet.
(Note: I don’t know what’s up with Goodreads not being able to figure out that more than one author can have the same name, but I’m pretty sure he is not the Bradley Paul who wrote the guide to Microsoft Windows, though I’m sure that, too, is also full of hilarity and sadness.)
In poems that recall the best of Charles Simic, James Tate, and Wislawa Szymborska, Paul expertly walks the elusive line between sadness and hilarity, and his poems have a way of making you feel suddenly jolted awake to the world around you. He is an immensely gifted poet who has figured out how to touch the deepest darkness with the lightest hand, and this is his best book yet.
(Note: I don’t know what’s up with Goodreads not being able to figure out that more than one author can have the same name, but I’m pretty sure he is not the Bradley Paul who wrote the guide to Microsoft Windows, though I’m sure that, too, is also full of hilarity and sadness.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review