Transmissions from Bone House

When I read the poems in Stephen Bunch's new book, Transmissions from Bone House, especially late at night, it's like listening to a pirate radio station. Unlicensed and unregulated, his voice comes to me on a frequency all its own that simply can't be found elsewhere on my dial. "The air fills with signals and wonders" and, receiving him, I think I know him. I, for one, am staying tuned. - William Slaughter, editor of Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics, author of Untold Stories and The Politics of My Heart Inside the Bone House, nouns break down, "verbs evaporate" and we enter a parallel reality Bunch casually reveals one sun at a time, one whisper from where "the glacier stopped moving millennia ago". What is real and what is not? In this collection of sparse, yet rich poetry, everything is real. We experience the intersection of two worlds, slipping into that second world where memories twine "in next year's bean vines" and we find ourselves deftly delivered into a setting where "angels live under wallpaper." - Sherry O'Keefe, author of Cracking Geodes Open, poetry editor of IthacaLit In the poem "Data," Stephen Bunch writes: "Like speech balloons in comics, / words and their products/ have moved into a cloud...." The poet takes tropes of previous literary ages and destabilizes them to address digital-age environments. No sonnets here, but many lyrics that function like sonnets and odes. The ironies are not contrived, but rather intrinsic to daily outrages, like the beginning of "Crawlspace": "In the newspaper today: / Paranoia on the rise." Bunch, a master poet, challenges readers to stay alert. No sleepwalking through his Transmissions from Bone House. Each page contains quiet explosions. - Denise Low, 2007-9 Kansas Poet Laureate, author of Mélange Block and Jackalope The poems in this book create a paradoxical universe where reductionism generates expansive vision, and despair works its way into humor. The poet makes this happen through his vision and command of the mutability of language and his view of the unreliability of perception and the mutability of story-lines that we often cling to. - Donald Levering, author of The Water Leveling with Us and Coltrane's God