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Brendan Lorber reads from If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving?

“Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?” Christopher Marlowe asked us in iambic pentameter a few years back, and I thought of that as I began to read If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving? because I fell in love at the first sight of the first poem on the first page, all caesuraed up into pieces perhaps like a parent cuts up food for the toddler, making it easier to eat, to read the language which is compact and funny, full of opposites, oxymorons and irony, full of surprises too that are not so funny, but in effect beautiful and, like every poem is supposed to be, true. There is so much to enjoy, I urge the reader to start now. Here is that first poem.


LUCKY BREAK OF DAY

The nor’eastershut downthe subways
so whatever prevented mefrom going
to your partywas cancelledincluding
your partyand any meansto get there

Everything we sayhides whatwe mean
but also creates a little spaceto discover it
Like clouds get the blamebut it’s the sun
that blots out all the starseven on a perfect day

Even perfectioncan’t be a thinguntil
the day is talledand no longer happening
Like a scenic roadand the overlooks with
shrinesto whoever didn’t quite make the turn

If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving? is the first full length book by Brendan Lorber; it’s been twenty years in the making—good poems, as Horace told us, take awhile—and as Anselm Berrigan reminds us in his introduction to Brendan’s reading at Saint Mark’s Church last May, “It’s wildly overdue.”

You can buy If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving? through SPD Books. Check it out here:

http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781930068704/if-this-is-paradise-why-are-we-still-driving.aspx




If This Is Paradise Why Are We Still Driving? is published by subpress. You can check them out here:

http://www.subpresscollective.com/

Brendan Lorber

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