Crying of Small Motors

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Through portraits of working class life and meditations on strange, even comedic aspects of personal tragedy, Crying of Small Motors follows the poet's search for a poetics of devotional wildness, for language that balances sorrow, absurdity and optimism. Brandis's voice is lyric, narrative and spare. His poems are acts of restless defamiliarization: a voracious sea lion he encountered while rowing is like a familial unkindness carried to the grave; a wounded veteran is like a fermata in a wheelchair. He approaches his large subjects by way of small gestures. As reviewer John Wall Barger wrote, "we trust the poet and follow him into increasingly strange, Transtroemer-like spaces: above the small print / grasses, a horse's / double field / of vision folds / the country / lengthwise." The arc of the book follows the poet's struggle to fashion something useful, like a new utensil, from the grief and tragic beauty found in lifes' difficult places.