“This is a book that is sensible and smart. It throbs with life and style and the hard iron of living–the words beaten into tensile strength, all rust scoured into thought.” —Sam Pickering Winner of the 2008 Foreword INDIES Gold for Essays Click the link to purchase this book through the publisher: Purchase By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard Excerpts from the book … Continue reading By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard
“Phantom Signs is a magnificent keening for a time before written history “when lines were conceived and spoken in one breath” and gods walked the earth. In this magical time of pre-history, Brady says, poets composed “right at the vortex of forgetting.” Then and now, he concludes, “poetry isn’t written; it is the impression left after everything not a poem has dissolved.” Well, it has … Continue reading Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City
The Elsewhere is a new book with a long history. In a new arrangement of three books of poetry, a verse memoir, a poetic prose memoir, and essay collections on poetics, as well as new poems, The Elsewhere re-scores a life alert to the workings of line and sentence upon eye, heart, breath, and the world. The Elsewhere is Available Now Click the link to … Continue reading The Elsewhere
Wildly inventive, these ‘forgeries’ roam from Heraclitus to the Queen of Sheba, from Newark to Africa. Highly serious and richly comic, a great trip.”” —Maxine Kumin, Ploughshares Click the link to purchase this book through the publisher: Purchase Forged Correspondences Praise for Forged Correspondences “The wholly original and deeply felt poems of Philip Brady’s Forged Correspondences carry the reader to such faraway locales as Ireland, … Continue reading Forged Correspondences
An anthology of poems and essays delving into the origin and development of poetic thought, line, and structure. Poems and Their Making is a collection of original poems and essays by a diverse cast of inter-connected contemporary American poets, delving into the origin and development of poetic thought, line, and structure. Each poem is followed by an essay by the poet illustrative of some particular issue in craft and theory raised … Continue reading Poems and Their Making
“In poems of spiritual hunger and erotic receptivity, Philip Brady achieves utterance through formal gestures, “revealing in every form and syllable / a double essence.” The pleasures of Fathom are literary and sensuous, even when the poems address the events of 9/11. Through rhythmic cadences, “a murmur rippling in lines,” Brady brings the world into focus, “purr[s] ‘accord’ / into the ear of the continuum.” … Continue reading Fathom
“The poems in Philip Brady’s Weal engage us with dazzling language and intellectual range and a lovely music. The poems’ subjects range from a childhood of “scotch and casseroles,” to post-colonial culture, to the rootless “luxury and helplessness” of travel. These poems get around: from Brooklyn to Belfast; from Italy to Africa; from Youngstown, Ohio to an empty wing of the top floor of a … Continue reading Weal
“I don’t know of any poet living in America today who would even attempt what Philip Brady has masterfully accomplished in To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. Like a modern-day Homer or Joyce, Brady set out to re-envision his life as a mythic voyage after undergoing heart surgery and experiencing his own personal descent into the underworld. At times … Continue reading To Banquet with the Ethiopians
Edited with James F. Carens Click the link to purchase this book through Amazon.com: Purchase Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist Introduction from the book James Joyce’s first manuscript to be accepted for publication appeared in print early in the first year of this century. That publication was a review of Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken and it appeared in the … Continue reading Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist
“In prose richer than most poetry, Philip Brady proves that to go forward you go back. To sneak up on easeful death, you go back to primeval Brooklyn, mythological Ireland, equatorial Africa, ancient Greece. There are no strightforward chronologies here; instead, Brady executes a strong of backward flips during which he repeatedly sings his own dirge. What a performance. What a bite out of life!” … Continue reading To Prove My Blood: A Tale of Emigrations and the Afterlife
Philip Brady 