“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
