Jerry Bradley

In Jerry Bradley's

The Importance of Elsewhere

"the poetry twists and turns on a sharp pinprick of wit that lifts it from the everyday personal poetry we have become accustomed to. We read the poems, appreciate the art, and then WHAM! we laugh and then BAM! wonder why we are laughing at something that, deep down, is not all that funny but that on the surface is so filled with wit that we cannot resist." --H. Palmer Hall, The Yanaguana Literary Review

Jerry Bradley is the author of more than one hundred fifty published stories and poems and has published more than thirty critical articles and eighty reviews. He has received more than forty grants in support of his literary activities. Bradley’s poetry has appeared in many literary magazines including the New England Review, American Literary Review, Modern Poetry Studies, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review.

From The Importance of Elsewhere:

Summer knows more than one trick. Leaning
against a rock beneath an unnatural sky,
you spread your blanket before you in picnic,
eat berries and cream, and watch water fall
from parchment cliffs onto the otter camps below.
You feel the shudder of exhausted wind
(which is nothing itself) unravel in the hayfields
where the dog star waits for night, winking unseen
like a battery gone bad overhead.

When you read about places like this, you recall
the blonde who got sick in your truck,
its old gearbox groaning and bracing itself
against boulders in the washed-out road. Strapped
in her seat belt, she rinsed her mouth, eyes closed,
with the last swallow in the pint. You forgave
the frostbite in her dizzying kiss and thought
this is how things are just before they come apart.

--First stanzas of "Life, Death, Time, Love, and Scenery"

Palo Duro Canyon