Reveal: All Shapes & Sizes

Bill Berkson: Whether by playlet (and invention made his own) or lyric (the approximate sonnet taken for a spin), Bruce Covey has enough wit to align the discrepancies in our common parlance with the beauties of what he sees as its "sensational sleepovers." The laugh tracks split the sides of Mount Parnassus as we press onward "to the dark corners, still accepting."

Heather Christle: In Reveal, Bruce Covey has gathered poems that, at first glance, pose as incomplete inventories of their various subjects. They're almost comforting in their promise of having thought of every way to make an egg, every kind of triangle, every phas of the moon. As the reader moves right, beyond the line's caesura of punctuation, that promise disintegrates into fantastic, surprising utterances. They resolve themselves or do not. They shine and shake and thud. Like an unhinged, urgent fortuneteller, Reveal dares us to try our luck.

Sandra Simonds: Beauty that finds itself in the rarest intersections--in the cross between the calculator and the Divine Comedy, the fairy godmother and the hooligan. Intricate and clever, this is a wholly original book.

Heidi Lynn Staples: Bruce Covey's Reveal discloses poet as extreme cognitive sport, inviting you to leap repeatedly from referents into wide open err. Like all freesports, this one has inherent risks to the participant. Covey's poetic practice systematically breaks catergorical chains of meaning and breaks ranks--in a collection that declares "a language is a dialect with a military," wide-scale disruption implies a linguistic and thus psychological occupation. You may discover yourself as the write to piecefully disassemble. Reader, if you're ready, "Put on your pajamas and dive."

Bruce Covey’s fifth book of poetry, Reveal, will be published by Bitter Cherry Books at the beginning of 2012; his next-most-recent titles are Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell, 2006). He lives in Atlanta, GA, where he edits Coconut Poetry, teaches at Emory University, and curates the What’s New in Poetry Reading Series. His work has appeared in Best of the Net 2006, Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years, The Holiday Album (selected by Elaine Equi), and Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, along with many other anthologies and journals.