In Language Tinder, mostly poems of the people, places, and things that have lived and continue to live in the Pacific Islands, Mexico, and the American West, Ivan Brady asks, “Can you find yourself in me?” and the answer to that question is a resounding “Yes!” We find ourselves in Brady's personal and political poems of love, rage, helplessness, encounter, humor, reverie and loss. We find ourselves also in the anthropological poetry that takes us into magical realism, a couple of cleverly-linked haikus, and the imagined experiences of dolphins out of their preferred environment, the cowboy's horse, the “good” prisoner, the transition of a shipwreck from terrifying incident to lingering history, and many more. In one long poem, Brady creates a moving and complex portrait of a rich yet mostly forsaken and appropriated culture paved over by strip malls and “cookie-cutter homes.” We are left all the richer for our empathetic journeying throughout the book with Ivan Brady as our guide.
—Monica Prendergast, co-editor of Poetic Inquiry:Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences (Sense, 2009), University of Victoria, BC, Canada |
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