Ghosts and Doppelgängers

Brad Liening's poems capture that cuckoo clock moment when the bird comes out and sings of the uneasy comforts of a fecund imagination. Their hunger for transcendence is purposefully comic but no less deep; their slapstick restlessness of consciousness, of what to do with consciousness is devilishly nimble, absurdly heroic and always about the business of the miraculous. This book makes me happy. -- DEAN YOUNG, author of Primitive Mentor and elegy on toy piano The poems in Brad Liening's Ghosts and Doppelgängers offer up a surrealist melting pot full of oozing, bubbling, nightmarish Americana. They sound like Emma Lazarus on acid; like Thomas Paine and Eric Bogosian playing Exquisite Corpse exquisitely; like a young Charles Simic guest hosting TMZ. Through ironic memoirs, political rants, dramatic monologues in the voice of Nicolas Cage and other sizzling larks, Liening pokes fun at the wounded, consumerist megalomaniac in all (or most) of us. Ghosts and Doppelgängers is a fabulous book full of both absurdist pyrotechnics and satirical force. There's a new and complicated beauty here that's "like what you see / when you stare at the sun / with your eyes closed." -- GREGORY LAWLESS, author of I Thought I Was New Here