Uproar’s Your Only Music

This book begins with a personal, intense memoir. The memoir is a picaresque and kaleidoscopic preface to Brett’s new poems. Together, the memoir and poems constitute a vision that is half paradise, half abattoir. The memoir is all the more striking because as Brett tells of growing up in the shadow of his peg-legged, strongman potato-peddling father, he reveals that he is a hermaphrodite–sometimes angelic in his insights and also physically powerful, yet always on the brink of dying. Through excruciating pain in his bones and drug-induced hallucinations, he has stayed alive into his middle years as a poet-storyteller with a huge appetite for life and words–a man of brilliance and courage, who has confronted the essential questions and conundrums of existence.