Overview
Poetry that imagines how to live with realness, creativity, and vibrance. The poems in Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers speak to the emotionally and existentially tough challenge presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy: ""It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task.""Filled with wit, color, and high-spirited invention, these selected poems offer no room for softness and sentiment. They carry variant voices, whispers like dramatic asides, and mind-expanding assertions as they reveal their layers and nuances. Bedient confronts disasters of politics, love, and faithless time, never turning away from the glinting axe. This collection also includes new poems that are direct in dealing with the difficulties of keeping faith through life. They recognize that making something—for instance, poetry—is necessary to coach the world into realness and render oneself real in the process, a journey of both intensive investigation and creativity.
Reviews
""Bedient ranks among those who fearlessly, even recklessly, confront the dangerous, deadly, often ugly aspects of human existence. The abyssal and abject can be vibrantly terrifying, we learn, and 'what doesn't break us is nothing.' With a most visceral, nuanced lexicon, he meditates upon a variety of inter-stitched subjects--the holocaust, family deaths, madness, isolation, rape, and other great griefs. Bedient balances his excursions into the worst with playfulness and invention; Gertrude Stein feels like his true and inexhaustible Penelope. These poems are almost unbearably human, risking the edge with glee and deeply earned brilliance.""--Susan McCabe, author of ""I Woke a Lake""
“Bedient ranks among those who fearlessly, even recklessly, confront the dangerous, deadly, often ugly aspects of human existence. The abyssal and abject can be vibrantly terrifying, we learn, and ‘what doesn’t break us is nothing.’ With a most visceral, nuanced lexicon, he meditates upon a variety of inter-stitched subjects—the holocaust, family deaths, madness, isolation, rape, and other great griefs. Bedient balances his excursions into the worst with playfulness and invention; Gertrude Stein feels like his true and inexhaustible Penelope. These poems are almost unbearably human, risking the edge with glee and deeply earned brilliance.” -- Susan McCabe, author of ""I Woke a Lake""
Author Information
Cal Bedient is the author of five books of criticism, including Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Many Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist, and The Yeats Brothers, along with five poetry collections: Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, The Multiple, and The Breathing Place. He was a founding editor of the California New Poetry Prize and is a founding coeditor of Lana Turner. His poems have been published in Agni, AmericanLetters and Commentary, Bennington Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Southern Review, VOLT, and others. He lives in Santa Monica, California.
