If this is paradise why are we still driving?
Over two decades in the making, this is Brendan's first full-length collection of poetry. Published by the subpress collective.
You can pick up a copy on Amazon or SPD
Or at Unnameable Books if you're in Brooklyn
Hearing the great Brendan Lorber anoint someone “the Ansel Adams of bathroom mirror selfies” gives me license to call this new book the Flow Chart of Midwinter Day, or the “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” of “Second Avenue”: Lorber—whose poetry is gregarious, profound, syntactically opulent, and emotionally generous—has assembled a fiesta of koans, flights, and moody amalgamations, all narrated with a bliss-oriented, rhythmically-propulsive, deathhaunted insouciance.
—Wayne Koestenbaum
I’m psyched on Brendan Lorber’s use of a line that’s broken into phrases/feet, leading to unexpected syntactical twists. You get set up for one meaning, then taken around another corner. One hears O’Hara across the spaces between phrases/feet and sometimes the Williams of the variable foot. Sometimes shorter phrases sculpt exact tone-of-voice and meaning, and the line is also great as a philosophical reasoning method. Technique aside, the poems are playful, pained, deep, erudite, vernacular of now, and funny. Lorber himself remains mysterious. What happened? you say, then, Maybe I don’t need to know. “We don’t address the origins The origins address us”. This is a really good book for thinking, which is probably what it’s about.
—Alice Notley
Brendan Lorber sits at an ancient East Village window sill—a time traveler adeptat the patterns of emotional cataclysm, a Chesire Cat mediator between science and what air believes in...“the world’s, not flat, it’s bubbly.” To eavesdrop in the petri dish of New York City, is to be presented with a million stories that want some privacy...” the whatsit, and the hole, in the bag, it falls through.” In these concise poems beamed into focus by wickedly honed undercurrents, Lorber captures our cities of concrete and happenstance in koan after koan, bundled by catchfalls we barely remember, there, at the turn of the page, containing keys to other portals. Lorber gives us continual nightfalls that keep us primed in the embers of morning. This book is a love song, to the timelessly urbane minutae and its gathered appendages masquerading as you, out there…”I see you humanity / and raise you.” Indeed, shift your rise, paradise, and find me.
—Edwin Torres
Over two decades in the making, this is Brendan's first full-length collection of poetry. Published by the subpress collective.
You can pick up a copy on Amazon or SPD
Or at Unnameable Books if you're in Brooklyn
Hearing the great Brendan Lorber anoint someone “the Ansel Adams of bathroom mirror selfies” gives me license to call this new book the Flow Chart of Midwinter Day, or the “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” of “Second Avenue”: Lorber—whose poetry is gregarious, profound, syntactically opulent, and emotionally generous—has assembled a fiesta of koans, flights, and moody amalgamations, all narrated with a bliss-oriented, rhythmically-propulsive, deathhaunted insouciance.
—Wayne Koestenbaum
I’m psyched on Brendan Lorber’s use of a line that’s broken into phrases/feet, leading to unexpected syntactical twists. You get set up for one meaning, then taken around another corner. One hears O’Hara across the spaces between phrases/feet and sometimes the Williams of the variable foot. Sometimes shorter phrases sculpt exact tone-of-voice and meaning, and the line is also great as a philosophical reasoning method. Technique aside, the poems are playful, pained, deep, erudite, vernacular of now, and funny. Lorber himself remains mysterious. What happened? you say, then, Maybe I don’t need to know. “We don’t address the origins The origins address us”. This is a really good book for thinking, which is probably what it’s about.
—Alice Notley
Brendan Lorber sits at an ancient East Village window sill—a time traveler adeptat the patterns of emotional cataclysm, a Chesire Cat mediator between science and what air believes in...“the world’s, not flat, it’s bubbly.” To eavesdrop in the petri dish of New York City, is to be presented with a million stories that want some privacy...” the whatsit, and the hole, in the bag, it falls through.” In these concise poems beamed into focus by wickedly honed undercurrents, Lorber captures our cities of concrete and happenstance in koan after koan, bundled by catchfalls we barely remember, there, at the turn of the page, containing keys to other portals. Lorber gives us continual nightfalls that keep us primed in the embers of morning. This book is a love song, to the timelessly urbane minutae and its gathered appendages masquerading as you, out there…”I see you humanity / and raise you.” Indeed, shift your rise, paradise, and find me.
—Edwin Torres
Unfixed Elegy and other Poems
2013 Butterlamb Press. Available here.
"In Brendan Lorber’s chapbook Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems, the title poem is full of tense twins. Here is work that experiments with living and dying as they double on themselves from the first lines: “Take shape OK give it back / sweet world or tempest above.”
Read Davy Knittle's review in Rain Taxi.
Handsewn and each cover pressed from a linleum block cut.
2013 Butterlamb Press. Available here.
"In Brendan Lorber’s chapbook Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems, the title poem is full of tense twins. Here is work that experiments with living and dying as they double on themselves from the first lines: “Take shape OK give it back / sweet world or tempest above.”
Read Davy Knittle's review in Rain Taxi.
Handsewn and each cover pressed from a linleum block cut.
The Address Book
A series of sonnets posted on front doors, mostly in New York.
With a coda by Edmund Berrigan.
Long out of print.
1999 The Owl Press
A series of sonnets posted on front doors, mostly in New York.
With a coda by Edmund Berrigan.
Long out of print.
1999 The Owl Press
Other chapbooks include
Dash (2003 Situations Press)
Book of the New Now, with Tracey McTague (The Gift, 2003)
Dictionary of Useful Phrases, with Jen Robinson (The Gift, 2000)
Your Secret (Fauxpress, 1999)
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Dash (2003 Situations Press)
Book of the New Now, with Tracey McTague (The Gift, 2003)
Dictionary of Useful Phrases, with Jen Robinson (The Gift, 2000)
Your Secret (Fauxpress, 1999)
+++