my radius, a small stone

Author: Brad Vogler

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil (2018)

"The stone in Brad Vogler’s my radius, a small stone is not a pebble thrown to poke and pock a small pond. It is a 'hum of gusts & pause'—a slow way of being. Vogler’s 'ed/ing' is not editing of grief after a loss; it is 'wind driven / & lingering /chorus of ructions' gently 'map/ped' in time with the utmost of care. This exquisite poetry collection is a bookmaker’s delight: 'the pages grid us' 'a word at a time.' Vogler offers simultaneity, proximity. Home, bed, shore: his particulars are our familiars too. His palpable daily-ness carves an expansive sea.  We see, we turn, we pause 'without where / (a language for)/ the name (you)’re) mapped.' We enter parenthetical space. We enter beautiful two-page spreads 'where you lay/lie' within qualm/calm. We enter solace as his sonar places us, assures us: 'a brave way sits with/in you.' This book can be read forward or backwards page-by-page. Either way, Vogler pledges 'here: no claim of arc is made' then offers “'here are the small/ holds allowed/ to sentence// to think.' Brilliant. In a world of collisions, he splashes open breathing space."

–Lori Anderson Moseman

"What comes first, the landscape or the listener? Who hears the cow’s bell in the fallow corn? One of poetry’s necessary functions is to carry the echo of origins into present fields. Brad Vogler’s my radius, a small stone, dowses the living site of origination, how anyone thinks in spans, 'ensemplastically,' to use Coleridge, gathering not symmetries or perfections, but the swale of a living earth: 'listenscape//a hold shaken but.... /held//these are our//lake//lake///calls///(a)/ loud hold.' Hard to quote a field exactly, but there it is, a voice standing in one, and a sounding—exactly—the held resonances of memory. The other half of the equation, of course, is wherever you are now. my radius, a small stone, evolves, tenders; reading it is remembering that the ancient skill of echolocation has both a ‘to’ and a ‘from’ (and an I and a Thou): 'each turns you back/of what the days come to' Back and forth, alternately playful and haunted, and always homophonically discovering, Vogler’s my radius, a small stone (h)ears the correspondence: how 'each little/lithe piece only) comes together/if a little while.'”

–Matthew Cooperman