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Daniel f. Bradley, A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia: Poems 1996-2002.  Toronto: BookThug, 2005.

Reviewed by Donato Mancini
The Rain 3:4 (November 2005-January 2006): 2


Readers of A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia will immediately feel the poet’s discomfort with the boundaries of public/private, his explicit distrust of any audience other than the giggling imp sitting on his left shoulder. Emotionally, Bradley’s writing is a litany of fuckyou-iloveyou-pleaseloveme-fuckyou-iloveyou. You can read that dis-ease in the disgusting title itself. Readers are resented as much as courted. Line to line this means that Bradley pushes back against whatever poetic promises he’s beginning to set. He seems to write a randomized poetry out of a desire to avoid any implying any too-specific in content or tonality.

Bradley’s fight isn’t apparently just with his own conscience, however, nor merely with semantic forces of attraction and repulsion. His poetry is oddly public, I believe it’s party about the troubles with publishing itself. I guess that any act of publishing implies compromise, while making the writer vulnerable to attack. Bradley even seems to attack the absurd pseudo-psychology of success around publishing, even, in himself and reader. Is the poet looking for fame? Is the reader looking a celebrity or genius to fawn over?  Why publish, why read? Well fuck you, I love you, please love me, fuck you. It hurts. Celebrity culture is poisonous.

Bradley even takes this struggle into the streets, specifically he takes the struggle to bpNichol lane:

TEN REASONS NOT TO PUBLISH WITH CHB

raise your hand with grocery plastic
bag wave i’m sure
at this distance those
aren’t yours

gestures a lot of catching up
with what’s been going
on i’m thinking
you said my head

then you have thoughts
like maybe my phone
has stopped working
no one could tell me
no bike no more stolen
still maintaining it’s
not a song until some
one takes off
theirs

[...]

every where signs
in spite of content
there are skills to learn
used stories
a scar on my nose
for my trouble

no socks

spews folks on to the tether ball court

they’re still hear
bell hop to the dying culture

This apparently anti-Coach House Books poem (as far as I know he’s still friends with CHB) is not among the better Bradley poems. It seems to come more from simple rancour than the interesting, formal, emotional knots described. “problems with insomnia”, still pretty bileful, is better:

i’m sure not
should not be paying
i’m not
tails of
consumption
they just have to touch

leather gang
why do all
language
writers
dress just
like rich people

big coats and
we’re in the back of the room
against a wall a way

[...]

Those “Iwannapushyouaway-iwannamakeyoustay” feelings make Bradley pretty jumpy line-to-line; and therein is the real pleasure of Bradley’s poetry, which I like more and more. What’s best in Bradley is not the muted tone, which sometimes, as in the CHB poem above, is bitter and sort of watercolour at the same time, but the odd angular drift that results when the friction’s highest, melting his observation, discourse, and coherence to fascinating puddles. We enjoy puns as gentle as Roy Miki’s (but a lot weirder) , and movements that are totally unexpected, and rarely recuperated:
    
[...]

and the queen
shimmers into a mirror
and in that mirror if
you’re careful you can see
can sea

under ace frehley’s
guitar
were the service just
eradicate

technique is above us
is purple rain
platinum
fleetwood mac jacket and
tambourine set

and a nurse brings the food

The poetry moves like an already spotty home-movie with frames missing. What a great way for a poem to move. He also has an attraction to certain kinds of linguistic junk, which he sticks in like chewed bubble gum, dry and turdy, as if to vandalize his own writing:

smash
a letter unto the next one
hope for the best
but more than pleased
with any
just give me the hot one

“hope for the best” is one of the crappiest phrases we’re all mentally stuck-with, a phrase I’m sure has been erased from countless first drafts by countless writers. There is a lot of poetic self-vandalism of other kinds in A Boy’s First Book. Bradley’s tenderness, the intimacy of the writing is not something he lets us trust. You begin to suspect he’ll hork in your mouth if you’re naïve enough to get too close, and I think that’s one of the greatest things about Bradley’s writing. Not that I’d like to have my mouth horked in, but who needs another Neil Diamond of a poet trying to take the reader straight from the confessional to the hot tub? When these bits of languarbage read like Bradley doesn’t know that they’re garbage they just spoil the poem, instead of making the total image created more psychologically 3D, more haunting. “vesna’s soviet pins”, for an example among a few too many, puts “boy do you ever owe me” as the isolated last line/stanza. After

it’s a horrible
horrible lift
into the erection
please come back little jabba
the hut

i like the wing commander and
ignoring me on the patio here

it’s such a letdown that it fouls the whole poem, leaving a bitter-cute aftertaste.

There are a lot more good poems in this book than bad or fucked-up ones. On the first read, however, the crappy bits coloured my impression of the collection proportionally more than usual. It wasn’t until I reread the book that I realised its beautiful unusualness matters so much more. Even as a Bradley fan, which I now am, I feel that A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia is a good batch subtly spoiled by a few rotten ingredients. Maybe this is precisely because of the delicateness of Bradley’s poetry. His is a micro-poetics based on playing chicken (soup) with abstractions, on surprise, and the sense of intimacy created by writing entirely in lowercase: the pyjama-party-hugz “i”, which he uses and abuses. It’s precisely this trippy delicateness of Bradley’s writing is what makes it so susceptible to spoilage, and so on the first read a faint taste of chlamydia is present in every part. The more you read his writing, though, the less that matters. A Boy’s First is a book I’ll read many times.