A D R I F T
Grayson Books, 2023
Over the last fifty years there has been plenty of poetry that flirts with trying to transform the miraculous, daunting everyday. And so much of it is unremarkable. It neither opens windows into new compelling worlds, teaches us something about ourselves, nor breaks any surfaces. Michael Brosnan, however, is a poet who just might break your heart, because his examinations of how the individual mind engages with what he describes succinctly as “the strange and ever-present present” are relevant, distinct, unforgettable. So many of the reveries and narratives among the poems in Adrift are trapdoors into emotional and philosophical spaces that bring the cosmic and quotidian closer together. Whether he’s weighing stardust or the “musical hits of 1972,” Pez or the “truth behind the Ascension,” Yoda or Springsteen, Brosnan is a shrewd, seductive observer, flirting with doom, mortality, “the searing knowledge of impermanence,” yes, but also deciphering a way to survive from the “hieroglyphics” of the natural world, “Some truth/about the art of living and perishing/in the flow of things.” I love the poems in this book, would gladly remain adrift in the subtle music of their multifaceted lineation, their authentic undulating meditations on “the stubborn art of hope.”
— Ralph Sneeden, author of Surface Fugue and Evidence of the Journey
ADRIFT is available in paperback and hardcover at:
Amazon (hardcover)
And your local independent bookstore (highly encouraged).