Nail Yourself into Bliss brings both raw news about what diminishes in time and fierce advocacy for sustaining faith in what we might make of our lives. David James probes the great unsettling arguments about how and why to live. His humor is multi-leveled and uncanny, poking at despair, as in "Stop Me if You've Heard This," in which three men walk into a bar and never come out.
These evocative and impressive poems dignify the act of yearning while upending received wisdom: "Early to bed, early to rise up and stand-alone / in your house, doubting the god of your choice."
-Lee Upton, author of Visitations: Stories and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems
David James' latest book Nail Yourself into Bliss is a serious consideration of aging ameliorated by his boyish humor because "the punchline is always death." Through loss, mistaken identities, newly created ones, and despair, humor helps soften that ultimate punchline. As James writes, life is a "Sisyphus Festival." For people of a certain age, my age, this book speaks and resonates and whispers.
-Elizabeth Kerlikowske, author of Art Speaks, an ekphrastic text with painter Mary Hatch
Nail Yourself to Bliss by David James is both a beautiful and a heartbreaking new collection of poems by one of Michigan's finest poets. This book is rich in wisdom, full of identifiable life circumstances that connect all of us to each other and filled with imagery and ideas that will satisfy the human soul. James writes, "Wisdom is in no hurry to find you." But these poems will find you sooner than later, and they will help ease you on down the road back to yourself.
-M. L. Liebler, author of I Want to Be Once, and editor of Heaven Was Detroit and R=E=S=P=E=C=T: Poems about Detroit Music
