Overview
Poems that question the world with tenderness and restless introspection In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language, brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane, or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent, at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor, introspection, and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead, they capture the way thoughts shift, contradict, and collide. Inspired by the poet’s dreams, as well as travels throughout central Europe, the West Indies, and Central and South America, the poems are alive in voice and detail, yet the speaker’s connections, and more so, disconnections, turn toward isolationism, solitude, and loneliness. At times, the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry.” Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets.” This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions, observes, and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd, others deeply reflective, but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable.
Full Product Details
Author: Jason Bredle
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Imprint: University of Massachusetts Press
Dimensions:
Width: 14.00cm
, Height: 0.80cm
, Length: 21.60cm
Weight: 0.141kg
ISBN: 9781625349279
ISBN 10: 1625349270
Pages: 84
Publication Date: 04 March 2026
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Not yet available
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.
Reviews
""I like being adrift on the sea of Jason Bredle's mind. Prescription pants? Check. A flaming room? Why not. And a restful night of bat-sleep turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. In these poems, surrealism brushes against the menace and loneliness of life and reminds us, again and again, that we think and feel in the language of fireworks. Forget the sea: the dark skies of Bredle's poems are brightened by an expansive imagination. This is a book of oohs and aahs.""--Bob Hicok, author of Water Look Away ""These poems skip like stones across the surface of our amalgamated moment in history. Beneath lies the murk of our bottomless culture, its petty consumerism and hollow jingoism, its blatant hypocrisies and daily outrages. But instead of feeling sunk with tragedy, I Love You But I Don't Speak Your Language spins out a roiling, defiant, and gratifying farce. These are poems that leap and bound, that splash and revel. And no matter how bleak or daunting the distances they attempt to cover, they offer the kind of singular, centrifugal comedy we need to get to the other side.""--Jaswinder Bolina, author of English as a Second Language and Other Poems ""In 'Personism', Frank O'Hara lamented that only William Carlos Williams and a couple of other poets could compete with the movies. When I discovered Jason Bredle's poetry in 2007, I thought he was one of the few poets capable of cutting through social media, YouTube, electronic gaming, cable news, and our other million-noted contemporary distractions. He combines the disjunctiveness of Dean Young with the discursiveness of Tony Hoagland in poems that are as entertaining as theirs and full of feeling. In 2007, I thought Bredle was light years ahead of the ruck of his contemporaries, and in this collection, he's light years ahead of where he was then.""--Tom C. Hunley, author of The Loneliest Whale in the World ""I Love You But I Don't Speak Your Language is a stunning, original and deceptively irreverent collection of poems. Delight in language is tragically rare thing, especially with such generous intelligent directness as I see here. The consistent singular voice of the speaker through the whole collection, does not waver, and yet it creates a distinct effect: total trust, and solidarity, with the reader. It is a gift to be lonely together with these poems.""--Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World
""I like being adrift on the sea of Jason Bredle's mind. Prescription pants? Check. A flaming room? Why not. And a restful night of bat-sleep turns out to be just what the doctor ordered. In these poems, surrealism brushes against the menace and loneliness of life and reminds us, again and again, that we think and feel in the language of fireworks. Forget the sea: the dark skies of Bredle's poems are brightened by an expansive imagination. This is a book of oohs and aahs.""—Bob Hicok, author of Water Look Away ""These poems skip like stones across the surface of our amalgamated moment in history. Beneath lies the murk of our bottomless culture, its petty consumerism and hollow jingoism, its blatant hypocrisies and daily outrages. But instead of feeling sunk with tragedy, I Love You But I Don't Speak Your Language spins out a roiling, defiant, and gratifying farce. These are poems that leap and bound, that splash and revel. And no matter how bleak or daunting the distances they attempt to cover, they offer the kind of singular, centrifugal comedy we need to get to the other side.""—Jaswinder Bolina, author of English as a Second Language and Other Poems ""In 'Personism', Frank O'Hara lamented that only William Carlos Williams and a couple of other poets could compete with the movies. When I discovered Jason Bredle's poetry in 2007, I thought he was one of the few poets capable of cutting through social media, YouTube, electronic gaming, cable news, and our other million-noted contemporary distractions. He combines the disjunctiveness of Dean Young with the discursiveness of Tony Hoagland in poems that are as entertaining as theirs and full of feeling. In 2007, I thought Bredle was light years ahead of the ruck of his contemporaries, and in this collection, he's light years ahead of where he was then.""—Tom C. Hunley, author of The Loneliest Whale in the World ""I Love You But I Don't Speak Your Language is a stunning, original and deceptively irreverent collection of poems. Delight in language is tragically rare thing, especially with such generous intelligent directness as I see here. The consistent singular voice of the speaker through the whole collection, does not waver, and yet it creates a distinct effect: total trust, and solidarity, with the reader. It is a gift to be lonely together with these poems.""—Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World
Author Information
Jason Bredle is the author of eight poetry collections, including four chapbooks. He is recipient of the New Issues Poetry Prize and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. His work has appeared in JAMA, Denver Quarterly, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, among other publications.
