A Month's Worth of Instructional Poems

BY REBECCA BRIDGE
Paperback, 74 Pages
Release date: 09/01/2020 *This item will ship on release date*


A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems is a poetic handbook for exploring humanity through a surreal lens.

This book elevates the mortality of the human experience and enhances one ’s life view.

With an eye on nature and the everyday, these short prose poems explore the world not as it is, but as it would be if poetry was in the foregrounded of the human experience.

The poems manage at once to be playful, light, and even comical while still being deeply meaningful and far-reaching.

With language that is accessible and purposeful, diction that sounds like a friendship, and images that sizzle in one’s memory long after the mind’s eye imagines them, A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems is full of the kind of wit and wisdom that sticks around after the book is read and re-shelved.



PRAISE FOR A MONTH'S WORTH OF INSTRUCTIONAL POEMS

How to Make Butter Like a Pilgrim

Pour a cup of milk into your pocket and then visit the
house of every human you’ve ever met and tell them,
It was a pleasure knowing you in this lifetime, hope to see you
once more in the next.  Never look behind you, just
head out West at a slow churn.

This little poem, along with all the others in Rebecca Bridge’s A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems, seems the product of a marriage between Seneca’s wit and brevity and Emily Dickinson’s stunning lyricism. From each poem’s title to its last word, I found myself in awe of this poet’s ability to sustain such freshness of language and imagination, and to hold in perfect balance such profundity and lightness. Though her Instructions for How to Be Instructed suggest we read one poem a day, I dare anyone who opens this book to try to stop at just one. —Cathy Smith Bowers, author of The Collected Poems of Cathy Smith Bowers, and former North Carolina Poet Laureate.

Bridge’s dazzling aphoristic “how-to’s” are like the imaginary “hot-cold goodies” I read about as a child in Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree. You pop one in your mouth (or mind) and just when it starts to feel unbearably hot, it turns cold. I’ve always yearned for someone to tell me “How to Be,” but I didn’t know I wanted to learn “How to Churn Butter Like a Pilgrim” (nor that it would involve a pocket full of milk) or “How to Be as Self-Possessed as Rainfall.” It turns out I do. You will too. —Matthea Harvey, author of five books of poetry including, If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? and a New York Times Notable Book Author.

In a cultural moment obsessed with the possibilities of quick self-improvement, Bridge’s A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems delivers a truly welcome tonic. These poems pack vastness, wonder, and the simultaneous beauty and tragedy of being both alive and mortal into playful, imperative morsels. These poems won’t tell you how to boost your productivity or up your sales quota – thank goodness! Instead, they’ll help you simply revel in our shared strangeness and vulnerability. Pay attention. —Dora Malech, author of Shore Ordered Ocean, Say So, and Stet, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Bridge was born in the country in rural Illinois surrounded by cornfields, deep woods, horse pastures, swimming holes, and raspberry patches. She received a BA in Poetry from Columbia College and an MFA in Creative writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She is the author of Clear Out the Static in Your Attic: A Writer’s Guide to Turning Artifacts into Art (Write Bloody, 2014), co-writer of the award-winning short film Wednesday’s Child (Potenza Productions, 2013), and A Month’s Worth of Instructional Poems (V Press LC 2019). Rebecca works as a freelance writer, artist, jewelry maker, academic, and mother and lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, son, and two dogs.

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http://www.vpresslc.com/rebecca-bridge/

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7174998.Rebecca_Bridge