On The Verge of Something Bright and Good, Derek Pollard

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“There are forays in On the Verge of Something Bright and Good—a wigged-out game of Jenga, a relentless riff on “Denver,” poems of address to James Schuyler, Johnny Weir, and others—that give the speaker free rein, but nothing can “absolve the absence I made by adoring you.” There’s a beautiful heartbreak in this collection, as well as scenes that will linger, like the Manhattan buildings that “are still there even though they are gone.”

— Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, founder and former Executive Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and author of One Less River

 

“Ranging between richly textured narratives and artful experiments in form, Derek Pollard’s poems are enviable for the breadth of their imagination. Sometimes richly conversational, sometimes ornately lyrical, here is the gleeful zeal of the avant-gardist meeting the reverential mind of the metaphysician. The result is a singular poetry that delights and lingers long after the reading is done.”

— Jaswinder Bolina, author of the essay collection Of Color and the poetry collections The 44th of July, Phantom Camera, and Carrier Wave

 

“Derek Pollard’s poems burn brightly in exploration and explosion of our expectations—each one of them a threshold, all collectively precipitating newness. The best part is, these poems sing. Pollard has proven himself a chanteur of the highest order.”

— Eryn Green, author of Eruv, winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and Beit

 

“Derek Pollard’s On the Verge of Something Bright and Good is a tight ball of golden strings. Each thread pulled reveals a playful night, a delicious taste of skin, a twilight seen through glass. “The fruit is a dream we hold to,” he writes, and each word here is its own sweet fruit. If you want to feel like language loves you, read these poems.

— Nicole Walker, author of the Nautilus Award-winning essay collection Sustainability: A Love Story and co-editor of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction

From “Feathered Hair, Missed Appointments”:

To love you is this

Exact moment, alone and

Ongoing, the song forgotten

Not in the rose we hang at

The cross’s bloodied hinge

But in the wilderness

Of its singing

Description

Derek Pollard is editor of the critical anthology Till One Day the Sun Shall Shine More Brightly: The Poetry and Prose of Donald Revell (University of Michigan Press) and co-author with Derek Henderson of the poetry collection Inconsequentia (BlazeVOX Books). His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous anthologies and literary and scholarly journals, and his multimedia work has been performed and exhibited throughout the United States.

He serves as Series Editor for the Poets on Poetry Series published by the University of Michigan Press. Previously, he served as Associate Editor at Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, as Poetry and Nonfiction Editor at Witness, and as Associate Editor at New Issues Poetry & Prose.

He holds a PhD in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Black Mountain Institute Fellow in Poetry, and has taught most recently at the Downtown Writers Center, University of Tampa, and Ringling College of Art and Design.

 

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