The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics - by Philip Brady
Publication Date: February 28, 2021
Paperback, 216 pages
ISBN 978-1-937968-73-1
Available (upon publication) from Small Press Distribution
The Elsewhere is a new book with a long history. In a new arrangement of three books of poetry, a verse memoir, a poetic prose memoir, and essay collections on poetics, as well as new poems, The Elsewhere re-scores a life alert to the workings of line and sentence upon eye, heart, breath, and the world.
Praise for Philip Brady and The Elsewhere
Philip Brady's The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics is a collection aimed at eternity. Brady's new and selected provides an unabashedly bardic synthesis of the smoking girders and brickwork that make a life in poetry. Ranging from Queens to West Cork, from Youngstown to Lagos, The Elsewhere negotiates the landscape between recollection and release, between art and life, between impulse and sudden song: "I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. / But memory's a muscle letting go." The essays on poetry, and the poetry itself, are Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday. The Elsewhere is everywhere ambitious, but more importantly, its poems and prose dwell in a kind of singing that begins in the forever that is right here.
Dante Di Stefano
I don't know anyone with Philip Brady's profound sense of his work's embeddedness in history, it's origins in the body, it's realization of community.
H. L. Hix
Philip Brady Philip Brady is executive director and co-founder of Etruscan Press, and a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University. He has taught at University College Cork in Ireland, as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the National University of Zaire, in the Semester at Sea Program, and in the Wilkes University Low-Residency MFA Program. For more information about the author, please visit www.philipbrady.com.