Vacation of a Lifetime

Synopsis

‘This volume gathers poems from Brady’s sequence, Liberties, with many singular works published in journals or previously uncollected. It presents the first opportunity to survey the territory of her concerted effort to write out the substance, body and system, which conducts and resists the transmission of recent US power surges.’

Reviews of this Book

‘Effecting an off-site sifting of virulently sexualized, life-style-propping policies that kill people, Andrea Brady takes readers on a Vacation of a Lifetime, her first book of poems. An American poet now teaching in London, Brady works past First World lies and representations, taking idioms and ideology and warping them back from outside: “bullets/ bought by staff at the heart shaped cafe.” Throughout, the book’s deep engagement with lyric as valid and viable cultural expression, despite its imperial history in English, evinces a belief in imagining other truths: “If you can reach/ to pull your presents toward you, I am there/ at the breaking point, floodlit with you and different/ as the world is now: I found/ for you a brighter hemisphere.’ —Publishers Weekly

‘Freedom to move through different gears allows the recycling of different registers to overlap without straining the juxtaposition of local word games and harsh political realities. The fire power generated by torpedoes of excess is just what these poems need and theres plenty of transgression. If some of the poems relate to news stories whose urgency has faded in the light of subsequent events, theres still something new about the sense of a political testament, a record of what it means to face up to the problems of the present. This book is not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a while to find ways into the brasher surfaces, but it is a rare example of a book of poems where the struggle between political radicalism and poetic form is worth sharing. Despite its title, Vacation of a Lifetime is no holiday.’ —Keith Elliot, Terrible Work