What Black Delirious Daylight Sets You Forward in the Boat

Robin Wyatt Dunn, always the poet of beauty and imagination, offers us a work of splendid topography. A dream, as poetry often simulates, is present within this work. Dunn travels the language of the Earth, its peopled history, to remind us (if we read carefully) that art and life are equal synonyms. The special thing about this collection is it is not only astonishing, it is bare and melancholy. They say sad songs achieve the best effects. This vivid verse compilation is sad, drifting, and mournful at once. The poet's exile is the chief image of the collection-as Christ Himself said, "A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country." A poet is home in his work. Here, Dunn both enumerates and interrogates the hidden dream we are too distracted to encompass; as simple souls in the brush, we do not wish to disturb the Universe. Yet Dunn did this for us. - Dustin Pickering, founder of Transcendent Zero Press - - And so with darkness, I read Dunn's manuscript contemplating my aches dangling free, albeit grisly and vanishing, "I'm leaving Los Angeles...the decision to love is like an old whisker...with my knife to your back...wracked runt and wired to the max." It is rather sardonically discerning to have these lines put into mind of that vexatious, dreamy, pulsating rhythm, the one which we all at some point or another, struggle to disembark from our conscious of atrophy and decay. Yet, somehow, no matter how vast its burgeoning rust and bankruptcy have eroded our remaining faith and goodness, we still carry on in this archival system of scatological shuffle into something far more dwelt in lies and privation, for we are but beings huddling together to pride ourselves the courage in the dark: I am a writer, but you write me. - Lana Bella, author of Adagio, Finishing Line Press, 2016