- Praise for Lucky Animals
In Lucky Animals Brad Rose shakes things up with his supple, wild, and wise prose poems. No grass grows under one’s feet here, and yawns do not exist. These wry and wonderful excursions turn on a dime and jump the tracks into previously unexplored, unanticipated lands. Here is a master wordsmith with hot hands on the wheel. —Robert Scotellaro, author of Bad Motel and What Are the Chances?
Reading Brad Rose’s Lucky Animals is like a wild ride at the fair, where you drink it all in, and crave more. His work is unique and genius. —Niles Reddick’s newest collection is If Not for You.
Brad Rose’s stories in Lucky Animals are genuine treats: whimsical and surprising; thoughtful and fantastical. As you traverse each sentence of each story in Rose’s micro story universe, you feel as though you’re hopping along a disparate jumble of stones in a shallow river that ushers you onto a path of fascinating coherence and wonder. —Phillip E. Temples, author The Kanawha Anomaly and A Home for Laika
Among my favorite pieces (and there are many) in Brad Rose’s wonderful new prose-poetry collection, Lucky Animals, are “Chatbot” and “My Blue Period” They’re exemplars of the richly textured landscapes in the volume’s 100-plus narratives. Rose’s micro stories are not easily digested, but therein lies their virtuosity. They are multi-dimensional parables/parodies probing human behavior and perception that while diminutive in length are expansive in reach and insight. Activate your literary GPS and go where this highly original work takes you. You’ll have a wild and satisfying ride. Recommended without reservations. –– Michael C. Keith, author Quiet Geography and Bodies in Recline
Brad Rose fires off sentences like the Three Stooges with bazookas. His plots are fractured, his characters are eccentric, and his points are for you to figure out. The whole thing is meshuggeneh — but in the best way. — Howie Good, author of Swimming in Oblivion: New and Selected Poems
- Praise for No. Wait. I Can Explain.
No Wait I Can Explain is a wonderful mixture of prose poems and micros that will pop into your mouth like bon bons which then explode into tiny, but potent, volcanoes. Each piece is filled with truth and wit and brilliant thought. A master of the prose poem, Brad Rose delights and challenges the reader in one swoop, asking questions like how far back does the past go? Why do we get only one life wedged in between two eternities? He makes connections and observations about life and weaves them all into the tiny moments of flight that are the hallmark of prose poetry and micros. This is one collection you will not only read, but re-read, and re-read, and find another nugget of truth and wit and sheer delight every single time.—Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This, and The Way of the Wind
This delicious book of prose poems hooked me from the start. Beyond clever, Rose has an unrelenting quirkiness that makes it impossible to put this book down. “The ocean is on death row, the continents burn like pyromaniacal Boy Scouts, and almost anything might happen, next,” Rose declares in “Climate Change.” How very right he is.— Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of EROTIC, New & Selected, Poetry Editor, Cultural Daily
About Brad Rose I would say: “I don’t know where he’s coming from–but the trains don’t run there anymore.” Truly the highest compliment I could ever pay to a poet. His leaps of imagery–from planet-to-planet–are sidesplitting. Then instantly turn to excavate the deepest spaces of human pathos. No. Wait. I Can Explain. is a curio cabinet of creative genius. Acres of poems here by one of the most distinctive voices in all of creative writing. This guy can write.
—Robert Nazarene, founding editor, The American Journal of Poetry
- Praise for Momentary Turbulence
The paragraphs in Momentary Turbulence are perhaps the closest we will get to that razor edge where prose poem and story balance perfectly. They also highlight the many ways in which the works in verse here recall Pound’s dictum that poetry must be as well written as the best prose. If it didn’t have such a big Yankee heart, Momentary Turbulence might also be the answer to the question of what a Robert Bolaño raised north of the border would look like: blue collar pomo, searing, with a noir eye. But there is a twinkle in that sad smile, a delight in the beauty of a toxic sunset that comes from knowing just how long night will last.
—Ron Silliman, author of The Alphabet.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ron-silliman
The good folks in Brad Rose’s Momentary Turbulence live like we all do, alone alone or alone around other people. They know “the emptiness of one thing is in the emptiness of all things. This is the shock of the world.” When one of them splits the skin of a prose poem to stick out his head, look right at me, and say, “I warn you my friend, never turn off your eyes. The trees lie in wait. You never know when you’re going to hear shots,” I listen. You should, too. We’re heading into some rough wind and this book will help us through.—Christopher Citro, author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy
“Momentary Turbulence—a perfect name for Brad Rose’s collection of prose poems. They take but a few moments to read and are filled with wondrous turbulence. Rose has an uncanny ability to write a sentence, fling it into space, and have it return in perfect harmony from its journey– matching up to the following sentence. These terrific stories leap from philosophy to stand-up, and add a little mystery and some shtick. But make no mistake about this description—this is the work of a pro who wields language liked a sculpture wields his hammer and chisel—chipping away at every unnecessary word. Bring a copy of this book for a ‘hostess gift’—it’ll hold so much better than the wine you were considering.”—Paul Beckman, author of Peek
- Praise for WordInEdgeWise
Brad Rose’s WordinEdgewise displays the madcap features that readers have come to relish in his work — fast-talking, unreliable narrators and surreal situations depicted with brittle sympathy and manic humor. When it comes to prose poetry, Brad Rose plays, to borrow his own phrase, “first violin in the orchestra of the absurd.” —Howie Good, author of Famous Long Ago and The Bad News First.
Word in Edgewise, poet Brad Rose’s most recent collection, is as high energy as the title advertises. This language-driven tour de force leaves the reader breathless, from line to line and poem to poem, as the speaker explicates on everything from blind dates to mobile homes, from lightning to ghosts. In this world, blind dates are lightning and mobile homes and ghosts, as the author makes expert use of such literary devices as chiasmus and zeugma to bring it all together. Each poem is a glittering tautology, each line disparate in its sameness. The pace of this book is addicting, and you will pick it up over and over again to the delight of your senses.—Ralph Pennel, author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, and fiction editor of Midway Journal
Brad Rose: master of the synaptic leap. He unearths suppressed premises (hidden in stark sight thanks to our jones for consensus reality), leading us to the inevitable across no matter how many unexpected ceiling tiles. Multiple vectors are at subcutaneous work here, clause by clause. These paragraphs are like incognito erasure poems, extended family trees with insoluble fan charts. “When I was counting backward in dog years, the judge sentenced my jury to another week of hard labor.” Yes, ordinary life is exactly like this. We just need reminders. —David P. Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep
- Praise For Pink X-Ray
Brad Rose enhances our understanding of life, death, and everything in-between through manic images that challenge conventional perception. His poetry and short shorts remind us that good literature is not only something to read, but also something to experience. “Pink X-Ray” provides the kind of reading experience that rattles the brain and refurbishes the heart.—Howie Good, SUNY New Paltz, author, Fugitive Pieces
Brad Rose’s latest collection of spare and powerful monologues combines the emotional immediacy of micro-fiction with the precision of poetry to confront the twists and turns of our distorted psyches. The Pink X-Ray teems with voices in extremis — the homeless veterans, mug shot photographers, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers and their victims who have lived lives “beautiful with mistakes” (not to mention Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, horseflies and hummingbirds) — filtered, with sardonic humor and unblinking directness, through the referential arsenal of Schrodinger’s Cat, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Munch’s Scream and Vegas jackpots. If “redemption is the shortest distance between two points” then these gut-punching monologues are sure to help us on our way.—Susan Lewis, editor of Posit and author of This Visit and How to be Another
Comes now Brad Rose with this collection of tiny stories. True: thumb through the book and you’ll see poems and, more expectedly, given what I just wrote, very short pieces of fiction that only occasionally exceed a single paragraph or page. But they are all narratives, complete with a character or two, the necessary conflict, a beginning, middle and end—or, at least, an end that points to a range of possible endings, some warm, and some that remind us that the world can be cold and heartless. Rose’s narratives bring us tiny snapshots of terrible things, funny things, scary things and, fully human things. —Dale Wisely, editor, Right Hand Pointing
“Over and over Brad Rose delights with his ability to make us stop and see the world in a new way; from his candid observation that King Tut looks like a girl and the real reason we cry at a stranger’s funeral to his elegant explanation of Death (“it’s music and it isn’t”) and an evening with Buddy at the Pink Elephant. Each story in this collection urges you to examine life in celebration, playfulness, and sometimes in mourning.” —Doug Mathewson, editor, Blink-Ink Magazine
- Praise for de/tonations
Brad Rose is a master of surprises, twists, turns, and the unexpected. His wit in de/tonations is in full swing. and Rose writes like no other. “I had my doubts, so I followed myself around for a few days.” This book should be in everyone’s library. —Gloria Mindock, Author of I Wish Francisco Franco Would Love Me
These are mostly prose poems, with qualities associated with the tradition: a tendency towards surrealism and humor, a penchant for twists and leaps that land readers far from where they began. There’s also a blending of humor and menace, and a generous love for American idioms and settings. The speakers of Rose’s poems harbor conspiracy theories, seethe with violent tendencies, mangle clichés and invent bizarre similes. The poems reel from unanswerable questions to flashes of wisdom to twisted aphorisms, and leave us gazing into the abyss, laughing. This is a delightful and ominous book.—Margaret Young, author of Willow from the Willow, Almond Town, and Blight Summer
There is a deceptively light touch here. The humor is never vicious but is always cognizant that we laugh when we have cried enough. Brad Rose’s microfictions and prose poems—each piece the exactly right size and shape— slide easily into the mind from several directions at once, then stick around to scratch at the brain. Read this book and savor it.—Sally Reno, Editor of Blink Ink