Brawl & Jag: Poems

by April Bernard

Overview

“It is as if the poet set fire to her earlier work and wrote these poems in the light of those flames.”—Mark Wunderlich

April Bernard explores subjects ranging from childhood anger to adult grief, from a museum of skulls to the Western movie genre. By turns playful, sorrowful, and sharp-edged, Brawl and Jag stands as Bernard’s most personal and accessible collection to date.

From “Anger”:

I always lie when I always say
I didn’t know the gun was loaded.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393351736
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/28/2016
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

April Bernard is the author of five previous poetry collections and two novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, the Stover Memorial Prize in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Whitney Humanities Center, she lives in Upstate New York and teaches at Skidmore College and the Bennington College MFA writing seminars.

Editorial Reviews

07/04/2016
Bernard (Romanticism) showcases varied subjects and speakers in this uneven fifth collection, delivering youthful remembrances as well as present-day elegies and examinations of the natural and literary worlds. There are persona poems, too: in distant tundras women shoot wolves in the face, and in 20th-century Italy, an invented poet hides out in a hotel. But the book benefits most from homing in on private moments, which ring truest and remain with the reader. In one of the collection's elegiac moments, when the speaker intends "to drive/ and find that bar, the one we liked/ in Jacksonville// and ask some man to go out back," it's the "beer-sweat like pear juice" that lingers long after. In the book's opening poem, the narrator declares "I miss my anger" and drags readers through furious vignettes in which a thrown "pot of hot coffee" just misses "a man's head, and the black-brown spatter stains" still remain years later. Readers will feel for the book's confessions, as when, in "Across the Lawn," the speaker witnesses the grim evidence of a beloved pet's untimely death. The collection falters when Bernard moves away from the personal, and by the end the reader comes to miss these moments and their frankness, fallibility, and focus. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"It is as if the poet set fire to all her earlier work and wrote these new ones in the light of those flames."

Mark Wunderlich

"April Bernard brings as deep, as concentrated and imaginative, an attention as it is possible to bring to reality, history, the self, and to their triple intersection in our living language. This is a miraculously balanced, refreshing, and startling book."

Vijay Seshadri

"April Bernard has the best ear in the business. She harmonizes the raucous and the classic, the songful and the wry, the courtly and the quick. These new poems are the most powerful, intimate, lucid, and indelible she’s ever written."

Wayne Koestenbaum

"Each poem in Brawl & Jag tells a little—or not so little—story that needed telling. About violence, essentially, as the title suggests, and its opposite… Bernard’s gracious ‘Let me taste it first for you’ might make you think of Siegfried Sassoon, or of William Blake."

Elizabeth Macklin

★ 11/01/2015
Always a personal poet, Walt Whitman Award winner Bernard balances vibrantly bald openness in her latest collection (after Romanticism) with moments that are surprisingly homey—the desire to "confer with beasts, breathe in their sour apple air," the men with their "beautiful eyes/ in which I am looking for—." But then we have wolves slaughtered and burned after they enter a Siberian town and the desire in a poem about loss to go to "ask some man to go out back// so he can push me up against a truck,/ taste beer-sweat like pear-juice, sweet cunty death-in-life—." This is a book about visceral emotion; the opening poem, called "Anger," declares "my vision went red-black and/ I did not forgive—." Yet the speaker also says "I miss my anger" (she's mellowed) and a poem in the second section discovers, "tonight is right, there may be a way to go on." What's intriguing is how much stories matter throughout, especially as they connect us to the past: in one poem, the characters are "very careful/ for always until now, here, about which stories to tell." VERDICT Occasionally more melodramatic or aphoristic than some might like, this fine collection has the virtue of delivering that emotional punch many readers want.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal