Did you ever have the experience of opening up a new book by somebody you had never heard of, or maybe just barely, and in flipping through the pages for less than a minute thought, “Whoa! This person is doing something major.” That’s not an experience one has often – the association I make to that concept is how I felt seeing Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger for the very first time, before I’d even begun to read. I knew instantly that this was somebody I was going to have to take completely seriously forever.

I had this sensation again the other day, opening up Yesterday’s News by Taylor Brady. News could be called a book of poems – at 260 pages it certainly is that – but it could also be called (more properly, I think) a single work, composed of many parts during the year 2003. It’s not a diary exactly – most of the poems have titles, tho Brady hasn’t been consistent with the graphics of his titling, a strategy that is not, I think, accidental. The first poem I actually read all the way through lay deep in the book, on a page whose header contains the date October 21-22:

THE DUST CLUSTERS

 

Look, here’s a face, if

you lean in close you
can see congealed labor, plasma

knitting brows in concentration

that has decayed to fourteen hours’ sleep.
In the folds and flaps it smells
like peanut oil inside the head this

is the image of an elbow joint
blocked by hair.

Not so much the getting wasted
as the waste you get. Being ill-disposed

to buildup’s full, like time.

One could argue that this has all the elements of a traditional lyric – it’s constructed around a relatively coherent – if decidedly off-kilter – image – yet it really is the gyroscope of that frame that is the point here. Not only does the reader “see” the image first from the outside, then from the perspective of the figure in the poem, but it moves then not to resolution or synthesis, but rather spins off away from that – the last line’s “referents” (to call them that) is primarily to the vowel-consonant combinations of the last-half line of the previous stanza. Which is to say that it mimics in prosody what the previous lines have offered as scene. All of which in turn echoes the difficulty one has in focusing with, say, a hangover. The poem starts with a disjunct command – Look – and ends with an equally disjunct analogy, something that cannot be, of itself, seen: time.

That’s a lot to accomplish in just one dozen lines, on top of which it has a post-grunge surface texture that is quite unlike anything I can now think of being written. Five or six pages this good per year and you get to be famous, at least as far as poetry fame goes – but 260?

Let’s, just for the sake of the test, try another Brady poem at random. The hand stops flipping at page 97, which the header indicates represents May 4 – 5:

At Your Desk, a Highly Leveraged Zero

Every day is ground hog day
in the Cargill pork-processing unit.

An elite team of registration pros
can stretch your penumbra with size, snow cut
with small islands, marsh, ophitic structure
coiled about the flesh-stamps. No sweat, just twitch.

It’s written that the knife-hand often slips,

close to $50 idle protein all the long way up
to your command of standard stencils

in spilled blood and vermiform manure
over cereal monoculture in the new periphery,
to write in tiny burps and gags. Looks
as if the enemy of coordination looks like
futures, more bright winter glare on ink.

A sonnet about globalization with a slaughterhouse feel? On one level, this poem is not so radically different in approach from the close-up of the wasted person in “THE DUST CLUSTERS” – both use recognizable verse form strategies to present imagery that is completely – completely! – from outside of the received domain of literary imagery. But there the similarity stops. The rapid shifts in perspective of the first, which is all angles & fragments, is here a distant, cool objectivism, the one real bit of collage the comparison of cut flesh to mineral form. If the first poem feels like the cover image to a Kurt Cobain homage CD, this echoes the kind of literary ultra-leftism one might associate with Brian Fawcett or Kevin Magee.

Let’s try this test again, just flipping to the next page, the bottom half of which contains an untitled piece:

I’m probably more like a sand flea.

Without prehensile toes

the mathematical sublime
subtends whatever patch of skin
your post-whatever-else erosive

crabbed praxis of the gouged-out
decorative gesture on
the body of a spun

commodity can’t scratch.
Party over here, party over

there, nowhere the question
of the party. In bleached leisure
I’m all up in your skin, pus in pleasure,
salt in waistband. In English that
might rhyme. Here it’s rash, and flares.

Not, to my ear, as successful as the first two, but still superb – that long second sentence’s ever delayed pay-off has been done before, but the kick at the end still applies. If I have a hesitation, it’s that the disparate elements of this collage seem unmotivated – they don’t pull against one another strong enough. Still, the two meanings of the word party in that one incomplete sentence is something I’ll remember for a long time, that someone even wants to jar that particular set of possibilities strikes me as inherently exciting.

I can tell already that this is one of those books that I’m going to have to read slowly – it will almost inevitably take me longer to read than it did Brady to write. But that’s okay. Just as it’s okay if his sense of the line’s complexity isn’t the equal say, of Eleni Sikelianos, or the jarred juxtapositions aren’t as sharp as Graham Foust. What I see in Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News is a comprehensive intellectual ambition on a scale that I virtually haven’t seen on the part of younger poets in ages. It is completely awesome.