Bad Is Bent Good
Paperback
Publisher Price: $14.99
ISBN13: 9781951547288
Publisher: Aubade Publishing
Published: May 27 2025
Pages: 158
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.34 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
Bad Is Bent Good by Dave Mehler is a deeply immersive, poetic exploration of life working at a landfill in Portland, Oregon. The poems are a dynamic mixture of prose poetry, haiku, sonnets, and lyric that draw readers into the gritty, suffocating environment of the dump, portraying its workers, customers, and some of the animal inhabitants. With meticulous detail and empathy, Mehler captures the harshness of the landfill workers' lives, their resilience, and their profound humanity, portraying the characters in a raw, real way without romanticizing their struggles. While the landfill is a real place populated by garbage and the marginalized, it also becomes an abstract landscape the poet uses to explore the philosophical and metaphysical. Most of all, the landfill is a vibrant chiaroscuro-a place of despair and darkness in which the poet delves to illuminate pockets of beauty and light-making it a pertinent metaphor for the contradictions inherent in not only the human condition, but stretching figuratively even to the outer reaches of the universe.
Also from
Mehler, Dave
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover
