Surreal and dreamlike poems that chronicle the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of life. John Cross’s WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED opens in exile and st(r)ays there. The character Mathias, a trickster who opens this collection, wakes with a primal utterance and startled vision born of commotion. Bewildered by the noise of our culture, he finds brief glimpses of meaning in fleeting, slippery moments. Mathias navigates life in exile, exploring the depths of his situation through the beat of his song and stutter, which manifests in a deranging of language and finds a foothold in cosmic disorder. A “scavenger for armor” in a world of loss and wreckage, he feels the terror of existence while holding onto the promise of a “breath still audible at near dark.” The second half of the book opens in the harsh light of a sun that “pushes down on our feet” and implores that we witness our world. In this brightness, Cross conjures shadows from his own memory and confronts a world where a president throws “his people to the wolves.” These poems move through the world in wonder, offering an elegiac hushed prayer to all that we are losing in a changing environment, to “the oriole ascending / the palo verde of bee vibration . . . & Mitchell’s satyr butterfly.” WHAT BLEAK ANGELS CARRIED YOUR BED is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn Poetry Open Contest, selected by Maw Shein Win.
