The Year of What Now: Poems

Debut poetry by Brian Russell, winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize

* Named a Best Book of the Year by Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation *

The year of what now
Are we the pure products and what
Does that even mean pure isn't it
Obvious we are each our own culture
Alive with the virus that's waiting
To unmake us.
--from The Year of What Now

The Year of What Now is not a book of poems about cancer. It's not a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. It doesn't parade the autobiographical in your face, though the conventions seem at first to be autobiography. It's not a cry in extremis, de profundis, etc. It's more casual, more canny, more casually well-made, more philosophically oriented . . . This book seems to me to represent a way forward for other young poets in its wide engagement with the world, in its unabashed embrace of the personal, and its equally galvanizing skepticism about the limits of subjective speech. At its deepest level, it embodies the desire to establish true sequences of pain from the cellular level to the most abstract operations of culture, technology, and possible worlds of the spirit. --Tom Sleigh, Bakeless Prize judge, from the introduction