Bradley Harrison

& other poems

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Academy of American Poets Prize, 2017 - Montserratby Bradley Harrison —after Wordsworth You stand awake in daylight’s frame: you pullclothes...

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

LIGHTING HUMAN LAMPS

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Bradley Harrison Reviews James Galvin’s “Everything We Always Knew Was True”

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Solmaz Sharif – Look Graywolf Press 2016 Page Length: 93 Retail: $16 The winner writes history; the loser writes poetry. Not that Solmaz Sharif’s debut from Graywolf Press, Look (2016) is anything short of extraordinary. It’s just that the cliché about the “winner” is too true for Sharif to resist subverting in her urgent, prophetic, and virtuosic invective against the Nation State in general, and the contemporary American Nation State in particular. It is hardly new for poets to use poetry as a means of political resistance, but rarely have we seen the politics of language play such a prominent role in the resistance. Sharif uses a variety of avant-garde forms to put enormous pressure on language itself so as to exploit its materiality, and therefore its […]

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Black’s first full-length collection relies heavily on received forms (most notably the sonnet) to present an aesthetic argument that is equal parts familiar and strange, and the result is palpably beautiful tension: between the traditional and contemporary; between first-book energy and technical virtuosity; and, most importantly, between faith and doubt: a spiritual disquiet masterfully imbued into content and form.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Infoxicated Corner: Bradley Harrison Reviews Blueberry Morningsnow’s “Whale in the Woods”

"This is a poetry of revelation and discovery, a kind of poetic animism that seeks to divine the sacred from within the world’s (and the mind’s) many strange forms."

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

For Gilbert, music is the ultimate metaphor not only for the poetic project, but, perhaps more urgently: the human self, which is a cluster of chaoses out of which certain harmonies may arise.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Infoxicated Corner: A Review of Russell Dillon’s “Eternal Patrol”

Maddening how, in this home, in this storm, I fear most the lightning and not the rain, the improbable over the certain. A sound from the map room: mellifluous, stupid river.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Thornton Dial, Outsider Artist Whose Work Told of Black Life, Dies at 87

Mr. Dial was a self-taught artist whose paintings and assemblages fashioned from scavenged materials found their way to the permanent collections of major museums.

I first learned about Thornton Dial's art from an art journal, and after further research watched a fantastic documentary about him on Alabama Public Television. He was an incredible human being and an absolute genius.

Years ago, when I contacted his estate to ask permission to use his painting as the cover of my chapbook, he granted that permission and only asked for a copy of the book as payment.

Rest in peace, Mr. Dial. Thank you for letting me lean on your genius.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Infoxicated Corner: Bradley Harrison Reviews Jeffrey Pethybridge’s ‘Striven, the Bright Treatise’

Jeffrey Pethybridge’s debut collection Striven, the Bright Treatise (Noemi 2013) seeks, quixotically, in Sisyphean adamance, to confront an impossible subject: the suicide of Pethybridge’s brother in 2007. Striven is mourning: a ritual toward acceptance—a stay against the effacement of history.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Infoxicated Corner: Bradley Harrison Reviews ‘Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings’

As we discover in The Gorgeous Nothings (New Directions, 2013), an entirely new breed of coffee table book, the artistic genius of Emily Dickinson is hardly debatable and absolutely singular. This huge, breathtaking book features high-resolution photos of various scraps of paper written on by Dickinson late in her life. This selection of what scholars have taken to calling Dickinson’s “Radical Scatters”—writings on paper without a discernible literary genre—is equal parts poetry and visual art, and, in a very important sense, neither: a hybridity that challenges the ways we have approached and thought about Dickinson’s work since it first found its way to our eyes.

Of the reviews I have written, this one does the heaviest academic lifting while managing a sustained consideration of makeout etiquette.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

My Eternal Debt to Ricochet Editions

http://entropymag.org/ricochet-editions/ Any time I start to feel hopeless about publishing, or frustrated by another near-miss contest result, I'm going to re-read this, because it's a true story about how editors for one press were, like me, frustrated by MY near-misses - and then - by some miracle of the gods, decided to start a NEW press just so they could publish my book. And then they decided to, you know, keep publishing books - paying special attention to manuscripts that, because of genre hybridity or other reasons, might be left out of more traditional contest formats. What I'm saying is that I couldn't be more proud of my relationship with Ricochet Editions, and that I'm the luckiest sonuvabitch you're likely to meet. And you should read this interview where Diana Arterian - (who worked like crazy to make the cover into something I loved - and love - because I think it's an absolutely gorgeous physical artifact - the thing I'm most proud to own and to show off to anyone willing to look) - tells Ricochet's origin story, and in so doing demonstrates why she and Fox Frazier-Foley, Elizabeth Cantwell, Jessica Piazza, and a lot of people I haven't yet had the honor of meeting and thanking, are everything RIGHT with small press publishing in America.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

My proudest publication. 

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Guernica Magazine: Bradley Harrison's "Blankout"

Brother we are legion here.

[bradleyharrisonpoet]

Luna Luna Magazine: Five Poems by Bradley Harrison

That hand reaching up from the chaos / hangs bells.