There are several poems in the collections that give (perhaps questionable) advice about love and sex to the young, often to the narrator’s son, but the poetry itself acknowledges the pointlessness of such advice. There are lighter pieces, even some whimsies – The Bride of Dracula’s Gynaecologist on Career Day – but Bradley’s main theme is bitter experience with the death of love. In “What Makes a Man a Man” he gives us a frank appraisal of his approach – Many of the poems reek of disappointment and resentment – “You should know I kiss/like a fistful of mistakes” - and they don’t mince words. Lines like “Who made your hands stammer/ the first time they cradled a waist/ on the last day of summer?” give us glimpses into a past that has given way to sexual encounters made sordid by language and insults and pain. It’s the bitter dregs of what might have been a sweet drink – you can taste bits of the sweetness in the sticky residue on the sides of the glass – imbibed in the sort of establishment you wouldn’t admit to frequenting. Dodging Traffic, by Jesse Bradley, is another of his offerings, and here I am, definitely in a space I wouldn’t have entered on my own.ĭodging Traffic is a story of love turned ugly. I suspect he’s always curious about whether the wall or the reader will give way first. Jason Cook, at Ampersand Press, seems to like backing readers up against the walls of their own comfort zones and giving them a good solid push.
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