A subtle centrifugal force drives this collection. By turns witty, solemn or capricious, the book moves outward from private, often lyrical poems about childhood and memory on into the realm of the "real world's" self-serving myths, fears, and institutionalized inequities, and from there into work that celebrates the joys of love and the beauty and mystery of the natural world, and then still further outward into poems that consider the very nature of reality, what it means to be human, and where to find glimpses of the sacred in the midst of the profane and the disenchanted. |
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These poems can make paint bubble and burn. Read them in broad daylight, to be on the safe side.
—Mike Finley, author of Victory Through Song and editor of Lief Magazine
There is a passionate drive and hunger in these poems—"Slow down you wolves. I am lonely too!" These poems dance with the movement and depth of each moment of time lived, filled with histories, memories, and ghosts who must not be woken but which claw at the shadows of awareness.
—Jared Smith, author of The Collected Poems: 1971-2011, and To the Dark Angels
In Jesus of Walmart, Richard Broderick explores the often shifting boundaries between human and animal, human and human, the self and the larger world, the macabre and the mythological, one side of the sky and the other—in the endless night to which the eyes refuse to adjust. We, the many, live and breathe in these poems, moving with deep humanity, with the wind and the snow and the river, with our daily grace.
—William O’Daly, author of The Road to Isla Negra and translator of Pablo Neruda
There are poems in Jesus of Walmart with extraordinary respect for distance, both historical and emotional. There are poems full of great lyric singing. A portrait emerges, as the narrator turns out to the world, and history, turns toward love and memory, we see his discernment of self, his dreams, his books—we become intimate with what he loves about light and rain, we walk with him as he holds up the lantern to the darkness he sees, but we always hear the singing.
—Deborah Keenan, author of So She Had the World and From Tiger to Prayer
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