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In The Circus of his Bones, Brightman leads off with the line All good myths begin with a bird or a human. He’s right and although there are birds in this book you are riding along with Adam and realizing this creation business is no simple matter. It’s complicated, messy and dire and that is something we all understand well as we rename the animals for a new millennium. The thing is just when Adam is has been knocked around and is swirling into the deadlights of his own confusion, just then, we see Eve. Eve is the windswept voice of dreams to bring anchor to this confusion. There is nothing simple with voicing creation, but here in this circus we are wrapped like the children of winter, waiting for every word as if it were Bumba vomiting up the sun.
Jason Baldinger
Author of A Threadbare Universe
Steve Brightman’s The Circus in His Bones is a brilliant work, both in conception and execution. Skillfully utilizing three distinct voices-Adam’s, Eve’s, and the Serpent’s-Brightman imparts a sensitive and comprehensive story of the human condition. Each poem tempts the reader into the next one, the trinity of voices sown throughout the manuscript blooming into a glorious …reforestation / …cauterizing the edge / of blue until death looks away, ecstatic.
-Dianne Borsenik, author of Raga for What Comes Next
In 1931, the Cleveland Indians were kicked out of League Park into the larger, wider Cleveland Stadium, much as Adam and Eve had been kicked out of Eden and left to roam the world. Steve Brightman takes the original power couple and transplants them into a city so modern it may as well be timeless (indeed, he explicitly tells us that Past, present, and future are all visible at once. [–‘serpent announces the final birth of adam’]). Adam pogoes us from Genesis to Revelation, with every conceivable stop in between, Eve breaking in like Nancy Sinatra in Some Velvet Morning once in a while to sing to seven and a half billion Cains and Abels of a future that wants to be a present. Adam embraced the confluence of architecture and munitions in 1951; League Park was, for the most part, razed. But Adam is stubborn enough to …refuse[…] to admit/every heartbeat is a jailbreak [–‘adam loops experimental art on his living room wall’], and thus here we are, with a pretty darn magnificent collection in front of us.
In this dense metamodern reimagination of the Adam and Eve mythology, Steve Brightman wrestles artfully with what it means to be a white man in today’s world with authenticity, inventiveness, wit, and deep intelligence.
