Cal Bedient’s third collection of poems

$14.00 Paper, 978-0-9754990-9-2
2008 • 80 pp. 5 1/2 x7 1/2"

•Reviews•
•Excerpt•
•About the Author•

In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient’s third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient’s signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn’t let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.

The poems of Days of Unwilling “love all things straining at their leash of blood.” In a voluptuous diction of art history, music theory, and philosophy, Bedient summons us to examine the solo body, the collective body, their leashes, and their blood—not as figures of imagination but as creatures, remonstrances, monsters, lovers. His genius is to have unearthed the widest possible lexicon to address (and redress) our times.

—Jane Miller

Alison Thank You for your Question

Figures undifferentiated from their ground,
like hair curlers and a paper-towel-
floweret-patterned nightgown in the pubic kitchen

dusk? Like the languishing theory
of pogroms, seeing that “an object of history
cannot be targeted at all

within the continuous elapse of history”?
Was that the question, dear?

Yes, even if it’s female of the landscape
to sway into forms, like a well
trained soprano’s scream, a scream

is still a scream. The ground of things
shivers under the jerked-out texts

of the guns, of which
the shivering is the message, don’t you agree?

I base my thinking on Benjamin’s
Arcades Project and how glass

architecture is a late stage of development,
scholastic and deceptively open,

compared to which
a woman’s love is “luxuriant sap,” which is why

the branches twist, compared to which
“barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture.”

Made by burning, the building is burning.

Cal Bedient is the author of two earlier books of poems, Candy Necklace and The Violence of the Morning, and of five books of criticism, the latest of which is The Yeats Brothers and Modernism's Love of Mobility (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). He is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and a co-editor of the University of California's New California Poetry Series and of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion, new this year.