Description
Poetry. "Q: Is 'cities' a real word? A: No, there is only one city." Compressed and expansive by turns, Franklin Bruno's first collection of poems moves through the languages of commerce and philosophy, the forgotten codes of old Hollywood and the radio serial, and the contested spaces of the contemporary city with musicality, anger, and wit.
"Franklin Bruno's first collection of poetry comes at the end of a long process of distillation. A musician by trade, his ear is impeccable. A longtime student of contemporary poetry, his gestures are razor-sharp. I think of him as a scrutinizer of the populace, the poet who turns a mirror/camera on the street scene, coffee shop, office conversation. Bruno is an omniscient author, but a modest one, sending his gnosis-melody into the world on the wings of an accordian."—Lisa Jarnot
"Like his sometime Edge Books labelmate Kevin Davies, Franklin Bruno knows his way around a koan. Line after hilarious lancing line of Bruno's poetry begs the question, 'what is this an example of?'—and you always keep reading, because you never quite know. THE ACCORDIAN REPERTOIRE contains many different kinds of poem, but they all share a virtuous skill in making anagrams, acrostics, and deep, deep puns out of ordinary language and arcana alike. The poems feel beamed-in and intimate at once, as if those Martians Jack Spicer used to take dictation from have finally found another ideal poet, but one who wonderfully keeps mishearing what they say. 'I love pastrami,' he writes. 'I mean astronomy.'"—Chris Nealon
"In this book, language pretends to be found, and it 'is.' As in the mysterious final scene of Melville's Bartleby, 'The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.' This is beautiful work."—Lucy Ives