Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. The subtitle to JOURNEY TO THE SUN offers this summary: "Wherein the Author recounts his travels, at the tender age of Thirteen, to the Source of All Life, accompanyied by his father's employer, Mister George Westinghouse, and not neglecting the Author's youthful opinions on the matters of Publick Education, Poetry, and Messianic Time." Frequently borrowing from the texts of long-dead authors, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Burton, William Blake, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and a host of other non-contemporaries, the result is an epic poem deeply at odds with the dominant styles and concerns of its time, which itself may prove timely.
"Brent Cunningham has written one of those rare, almost paradoxical books that balance the quietly luminous with the absolutely batshit. JOURNEY TO THE SUN reads like a collaboration between Judge Schreber and late Wallace Stevens—part Supreme Fiction, part Nervous Illness. I think of this book as an exploration of the wondrous folly and obstinate perseverance which it takes to write poetry in these parlous times, let alone a poetry that sets its sights beyond the dazzling horrors of our self-destructing planet."—Jasper Bernes
"In his awesome second book, Brent Cunningham rhetoricizes and exclaims his way to an answer of sorts by sending the Author, a 13-year-old Everypoet, to the Source of Everything and back. Part true autobiography, part inverted Inferno, part manifesto for these End Times, JOURNEY TO THE SUN spares nothing in its manically slant indictment of the mobile class, trivia, globalization, America, ego, environmental destruction, and the state of poetry."—Anna Moschovakis
Review
"What if a naïve American teenage boy had visions like William Blake's, imagined solutions brought by angels and aliens to the Earth's most pressing problems, and what if he tried (like Blake) to write them all down, inventing (like Blake) a new form of partly narrative, partly gnomic, verse in order to do it? Cunningham's charming, unexpectedly ambitious, delightfully unified second collection answers that question in an insistently quotable set of short linked poems full of real wisdom. "You ask for prophecies--/ I give you prophecies," Cunningham's stand-in declares, instructing whatever human beings will listen. Elsewhere the boy explains, perhaps correctly, "truly there are only 2 forms/ of human problems:// 1: there is Some-thing left to think/ 2. there is nothing left to think." The title announces at once the boy's interest in planets and stars, his imagined trip to the sun, and his perhaps tongue-in-cheek imagined future, where "Every-one will live on the Sun!/ and sit at Solar Tables!/ EVENTUALLY!" At the same time, he warns us, "this is only Poetry." Cunningham makes naïveté into a lens; each "division" and "section" rewards careful attention, a witness to hopes and frustration of kids and grownups on Earth, as well as to the "BURNING BALL in the sky!"" -Publisher's Weekly, Starred Review
Synopsis
Poetry. The subtitle to JOURNEY TO THE SUN offers this summary: "Wherein the Author recounts his travels, at the tender age of Thirteen, to the Source of All Life, accompanyied by his father's employer, Mister George Westinghouse, and not neglecting the Author's youthful opinions on the matters of Publick Education, Poetry, and Messianic Time." Frequently borrowing from the texts of long-dead authors, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Burton, William Blake, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and a host of other non-contemporaries, the result is an epic poem deeply at odds with the dominant styles and concerns of its time, which itself may prove timely.
About the Author
Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist living in Oakland, California. His first book of poetry, Bird and Forest, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. His second book, JOURNEY TO THE SUN, was published by Atelos Press in 2012. He currently works as the Operations Director at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley where he has been an employee since 1999. He and Neil Alger are the founders of Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera.