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Standing in Line for the Beast In her introduction to Richard Siken's Crush, one of Louise Gluck's selections for the Yale Younger Prize, Gluck observes of Siken's debut: “This book is about panic.” Jason Bredle's debut has little to do with panic, though one word likewise defines his first collection: riotous . In twenty-five somewhat longish poems by today's standard, Bredle offers plenty of belly laughs and wonderfully awful moments of levity, as in “Summer,” which (thankfully?) advises: If you ever eat too many enchiladas, Most often, Bredle's slam-like voice gravitates toward the ditches and side-shoots your car might barrel off the road into rather than the road itself, however much he swerves back onto the blacktop from time-to-time. In other words, only the tangential gets caught in the headlights. A few lines from “Bridgeton,” a poem that opens with the speaker reliving the day his parents were torn apart by a tiger at a bridge festival in a town the poem's titled after, illustrate how Bredle allows his work its own center. Halfway through, the speaker suddenly ponders the origins of the town's name, mimicking the voice of an eighteenth century settler: Well, we got this covered bridge, I guess Instead of grief, the speaker clings to absurdities, which seems to fit if, as a teenager, you lost both parents at the paws of tiger. Often, the openings of these poems startle with their unpredictability. “Apocalypse” begins: If eating corndogs and watching the demo- How does one resolve, however, poems that start so grandly, poems that often—and in good ways—find themselves off the beaten path? That's perhaps one question that Bredle will have to answer in the future because some of these poems read as though they could continue on and on and on, no matter how much a reader needs an end in sight. Still, while I was never quite sure where Bredle was taking me next, I somehow liked where I was going. --Jay Robinson
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