"Occasionally, poetry provides us with raw proof of what it is to be alive, perceptions that never stray far from sensations, an illumination of sparks as opposed to, or at least in addition to, the steady artificial light of reason. The poems in Fludde are tributes to the imagination’s ability to see through the tissues of the ordinary to something far more disruptive and timeless. They exhibit our blown-apart mythologies, persuading us that the occupations, diversions, and ailments of the world as it is presented to us, that we are trapped in, can’t be all there is. “In the shed, I hear/the thinning crows/stringing together/a final crown/of rebar for my head.” Such is the view of our coronations: unlikely, maybe even silly.
Fludde reminds us vulnerability is a precursor for transformation. I feel something in them I always trust: the deployment of form, musicality, narrative, and wild association, permitting the reader to see beyond the life of a single poet, and outside our current moment. The poems are not cut-up essays. They are not political diatribes. They know what Lorca knew: there’s a drop of duck’s blood under every skyscraper. And what Harold Lloyd knew: that we are all hanging from a minute hand. Or Andre Breton or Paul Eluard: that we are prisoners of raindrops. Full of the feral joy of invention and profoundly animated, Fludde makes us feel, as only poetry can, that we’ve found a companion for our dream life. I’d say this is good news."
—Dean Young, from the Introduction
“In this uncompromising collection, it is understood that shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing self, and that the sound of the chimneysweeper’s broom is “-weep -weep.” There’s a powerful moral imagination at work in Fludde, and its poems are darkly and passionately self-knowing about the consequences of how the childhood self is, as it grows, incorporated into the world around it. Read ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy,’ ‘Workhorse,’ and ‘Blind Minotaur Being Led By a Girl.’ Read all of the poems in this wonderful book. It’s a joy to experience Mishler’s individual skill, his inventiveness, his beautiful knowing versification.”
—David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the National Book Award for poetry
