Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossaand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new...

This innovative new collection of poems by Cal Bedient is Nabokovian in its artifice, its fluency, and its scope--from Kant to Jaqueline Du Pres's Elgar, from Mother Goose to the Upanishads, from poems after the paintings of Corot, Monet, Matisse, and Klee to extended inquiries into the complexities of sexual and other relationships. The poems take up the task of asking what joy is available in the dark and terrifying waves of disease, broken love, and death. The persona voicings are varied, odd, and memorable; and the poems vary widely in their feel, their rhythm, their typology. Everywhere...

Calvin Bedient's fourth collection, The Multiple, meets an unspeakably excessive reality with an unremitting intensity of its own. The "multiple" in question is the imbroglio of entwinements and failed copulas within us and all around us, the reality underlying and giving the lie to our stereotypes. Dazzlingly resourceful--witty, multi-tonal, musical, propositional, painterly--the poems thump the increasingly empty box of cultural goods, an inheritance that isn't really ours. We are left with a naked need for creativity in a cosmos whose gift of time is a gift of chaos. If in a universe that...