ANTISOCIAL PATIENCE
by David Brazil
“we rust like
ghosts in complete steel, we
rut like mice in crevices & there, occluded,
lay we forth the spendor of
edicts of song….”
The ominous failure of corporate culture has led to a resurgence of belief, in both facts and values. David Brazil will challenge your assumptions about the Enlightenment. Let him. The rewards are surprising and part of a daily questioning of assumptions both in beauty and about beauty, in fact and about fact.
Praise for antisocial patience:
The 18 suites of poems that make up Antisocial Patience are a kind of diary of days lived in the aftermath of political upheaval, when it’s quiet. Solidarity’s subsided, the torn-open world of possibilities has shut back down. But something’s changed; the poet has found God. There are hymns and psalms and sonnets and syllabics here; canticles and macaronic verse, little ABAB stanzas and Oakland argot with a King James twist. They are sidewalk-poems, working-in-bookstore poems; restricted and devotional, utterly compact and wide-water open. What if Bartleby had had a giant heart? What if Hopkins had fought the cops? Throw your phone away, the poems suggest; cry out your name in the street. Your friends will find you anyway, and you’ll remember that you’re really here.
- Chris Nealon
Maybe you read it on the bus, maybe you read it in bed, maybe you read it in a post-revolutionary episteme (and I hope so), but whenever you read antisocial patience, you will find David Brazil asking himself, asking the poem, and asking the reader the most insistent questions, the ones which begin “how shall I?” These questions aren’t answered but end of course in music, since “each law that’s needful’s written into / form if you can teach your heart the manner of its / reck’ning.” Against the days of forgetfulness, this book speaks with the dead and the living seeking a path based in embodied breath and the impetus of everyday choice, justice, and song.
- Alli Warren
About the Author:
David Brazil was born in New York and lives in California. His first full-length book was The Ordinary. Chapbook publications include Spy Wednesday and Meet Me Beneath The War Angels. With Sara Larsen, he published over sixty issues of the xerox periodical TRY! He organizes free education through the Bay Area Public School, attends church at Taylor Memorial United Methodist in West Oakland, and makes his living as a bookseller.