War at Home

A child trapped in a house of pandemonium where all the phones are fish. Brothers playing war games against an enigmatic foe. The modern-day son of Odysseus hiding in a cloud of blunt smoke in the garage while predators lurk within and without. In his debut collection, Christopher Brunt deploys a restlessly inventive array of forms and voices, from the philosophical to the feverishly surreal, giving us artists who overdose on their own desire, prophets who sing the kingdom’ s collapse from strip club booths and from behind the bars of death row. These poems are allegories and fables of selves in crisis, and in the desperate throes of transformation. In flashes of lucid narrative or high-wire lyric inquiry, they seek to clarify the most urgent of personal truths out of the chaos and overflow of memory, out of secrecy and shame, out of wonder and mourning. More than an exploration of masculinity, power and authority, whiskey, guns, and dread, the addicts, religious criminals, soul-poisoned lovers, deviant saints, and lost brothers in this book forge their transformations via rhetorics of self-scrutiny— in the excavation of memory, they glimpse justice, are sometimes even visited by grace. Alcoholics wade shivering into the sure current of recovery. The dead witness the living in all their bewildering freedom and grief. Voices shed their bodies and wander the city at night, delivering sermons on being and time, asking inappropriate questions. New fathers watch their babies sleep or learn to walk, and hear the orphic languages of mothers, two, or seven, or a multitude issuing from the dimensions of eternity, pitying the whole world its cruelty. Profane, ecstatic, vulnerable, and fluent in as many literary registers as there are angles in a mirrored room, WAR AT HOME is autobiography written in myth.