Today's poem is "Start"
from What's This, Bombardier?
Ryan Flaherty
is the recipient of the 2010 PEN /New England Discovery Award for Poetry. He has published two chapbooks, Novas, which won the Boom Chapbook Contest, and Live, from the Delay. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Ninth Letter, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Columbia, POOL, Conduit, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New Hampshire.
Other poems by Ryan Flaherty in Verse Daily:
Books by Ryan Flaherty:
Ryan Flaherty's Blog.
About What's This, Bombardier?:
"Ryan Flaherty delivers a magnificent, controlled rawness in What's This, Bombardier? Full-hearted and intellectually dexterous, it is an elegant scaffold constructed around the chaos of existential uncertainty. . . . Flaherty is a gifted poet—his voice is panoramic and impeccably focused. What's This, Bombardier? is an outstanding book."
"In another world, where things are made of words, the poems of Ryan Flaherty would be flowers . . . With the poems of Baudelaire, Flaherty's first collection would bloom in that other world—but do so in whorls and loops, self-aware as any self-deflecting postmodernist needs to be. A bouquet of poems, in which 'the fireflies / reset the coordinates': Flaherty's first book is charming, scintillating, challenging, and fun."
"Beneath the wit of these poems—and wit there is in dizzying plenty—there are sobering concerns, skeptical and philosophical quandaries that, almost as if by mistake, make themselves felt. . . . Source is, no doubt, the stake—'source' . . . this adhesive thing that is Flaherty's, given to us in unsparing generosity, in serious play—not source exactly, but resource inexactly, in poems that are 'brilliant / without all the fuss of brilliance.'"
August 21, 2010: "Conditionals" "All worlds begin with asking. Instinctively..."
October 16, 2005: "Subjoinders to Our Hero" " & so it wasgliding, variously..."
Alex Lemon
Alan Michael Parker
Dan Beachy-Quick
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