Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers:

Cal Bedient is the author of five books of criticism, including Eight Contemporary Poets, He Do the Police in Many Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist, and The Yeats Brothers, along with five poetry collections: Candy Necklace, The Violence of the Morning, Days of Unwilling, The Multiple, and The Breathing Place. He was a founding editor of the California New Poetry Prize and is a founding coeditor of Lana Turner. His poems have been published in Agni, AmericanLetters and Commentary, Bennington Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Fence, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Southern Review, VOLT, and others. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

“Bedient ranks among those who fearlessly, even recklessly, confront the dangerous, deadly, often ugly aspects of human existence. The abyssal and abject can be vibrantly terrifying, we learn, and ‘what doesn’t break us is nothing.’ With a most visceral, nuanced lexicon, he meditates upon a variety of inter-stitched subjects—the holocaust, family deaths, madness, isolation, rape, and other great griefs. Bedient balances his excursions into the worst with playfulness and invention; Gertrude Stein feels like his true and inexhaustible Penelope. These poems are almost unbearably human, risking the edge with glee and deeply earned brilliance.”