Crying of Small Motors by Craig Brandis

$22.99

 

“Each of Brandis’ poems is an act of restless defamiliarization: a lover’s kisses are like a Tasmanian drug lord; a sea lion he met rowing in the ocean is like a familial unkindness many years before. We trust the poet and follow him into increasingly strange, Tranströmer-like spaces. A mighty debut!”

—John Wall Barger, author Smog Mother

 

“While reading each and every poem in Crying of Small Motors, I kept thinking to myself: Here is a poet, the real McCoy. Craig Brandis is a poet of work, for sure. He interrogates the industry, drudgery, grind, pains, and travails of what it’s like to swing a hammer for a living. But also, he is a poet of devotion and merriment and reverence for the same. Few poets writing today embrace the essential burdens of writing poems like Brandis does; reading this book, you will be in thrall of the precision of his capacious imagination. He sculpts poems from the standing stone of experience. His vision of love comes from understanding, and, by being understanding, he stitches together who he was and who he has become. What a welcome gift this book is.”

—David Biespiel, author A Place of Exodus

 

 “It is intuitive to seek beauty in beautiful spaces, but these poems seek it in hard places, where the reward is more profound.”

—Darren Morris, Poetry Editor Parhelion Literary Journal

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Description

Crying of Small Motors

by Craig Brandis

Full-length, Paper

List: $22.99

979-8-88838-586-9

2024

Through portraits of working class life and meditations on strange, even comedic aspects of personal tragedy, Crying of Small Motors follows the poet’s search for a poetics of devotional wildness, for language that balances sorrow, absurdity and optimism. Brandis’s voice is lyric, narrative and spare.  His poems are acts of restless defamiliarization: a voracious sea lion he encountered while rowing is like a familial unkindness carried to the grave; a wounded veteran is like a fermata in a wheelchair. He approaches his large subjects by way of small gestures. As reviewer John Wall Barger wrote, “we trust the poet and follow him into increasingly strange, Tranströmer-like spaces: above the small print / grasses, a horse’s / double field / of vision folds / the country / lengthwise.” The arc of the book follows the poet’s struggle to fashion something useful, like a new utensil, from the grief and tragic beauty found in lifes’ difficult places.

Craig Brandis’s poems and reviews have been published in Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, Parhelion, Trampoline, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, The Café Review, Streetlight Magazine and elsewhere. He was a semi-finalist for the 2022 Berkshire prize for a first or second book. He writes from Lake Oswego, Oregon.

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