Poetry. "Nadelberg's second collection offers dizzying shifts in scale and boldly propulsive logic from the stability of poems scrupulously attentive to what the aircraft industry calls 'structural integrity.' The familiar thrills and degradations of romantic love provide the book with much of its material, but Nadelberg's hands render themstrange all over again: 'I am a picnic. Sit down and paw / your hands at my basket arrangements.' The transformations love ruthlessly performs on us attune the poet to the radical mutability of the self and her reality—more than just a picnic, she's also toothpaste, an ostrich, and 'the river in [her] own way,' to name a few—but where others might succumb to the doldrums of skepticism or even madness, Nadelberg finds innumerable ways of pulling herself together. This is a beautifully affirming book."—Timothy Donnelly

"Amanda Nadelberg's BRIGHT BRAVE PHENOMENA gives us a poetic speaker so youthful and mercurial that we immediately want to call her charming—except that she also warns, 'I will spit / in the face of anyone who says I'm / charming.' But the primary colors of the book are blue and yellow and green, and the ocean is never far away, and we are made part of 'a whole / movement of people refusing to / leave their dogs at home.' It's all sun and solecism ('Come on, I'm exciting to be with you'), wildly changing accents and registers, and things missaid in the heat of the moment. 'Shenanigans: yes. / Drama, no.'"—Ange Mlinko

"What we have here is a lovely collection of Nadelberg inventions. These inventions are for telling it like it is. In order to do this they variously prick your arm, burn down, protest, pretend, and dance, to name just a few.... These are indeed very BRIGHT BRAVE PHENOMENA, that's right."—Rod Smith

Author City: Bay Area, CA USA

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of BRIGHT BRAVE PHENOMENA (Coffee House Press, 2012) and ISA THE TRUCK NAMED ISADORE (Slope Editions, 2006) as well as a chapbook, Building Castles in Spain, Getting Married (The Song Cave, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Conduit, 6x6, Boston Review, NO: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS and VANITAS. In 2008, she received a grant from the Fund for Poetry. Originally from Newton, Massachusetts, she is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Reviews and Other Links
profile: Craig Morgan Teicher's Four Poets to Watch @ Publishers Weekly
Barbara Hoffert's Voices on the Verge @ Library Journal
Ken Tucker @ Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life
Publishers Weekly starred review
Ryan Sanford Smith @ White Walls/Black Ink