Jennifer Bradpiece

Ophelia's tragedies haunt us: grief leads her to insanity, and the river takes her life. Yet madness and water may act as conduits for the cycle of death-rebirth-growth. Liminal spaces expand the narrow story of tragic ends. This book draws on possibilities found in the spaces between: health and illness, life and death, sanity and madness. Slip into this poetic river and hazard the deep, tenuous currents pulling at self and other, connection and loss. This is a work of transformation.

Lullabies for End Times is a surreal lullaby to living, always in the shadow of loss. The poems weave a tapestry of abstract, personal, and political themes. They dwell as much in the immediate as the in-between. Perhaps you are drunk on love, death, and gin in an alleyway. Perhaps as you hunch in the wet dark stench you hear some beautiful and sad music echoing out the drain pipe of a jazz bar. Perhaps as you drift in and out of waking, the moment illuminates how the sacred is never far from the profane. Perhaps the notes or rhythms that find your half-drunk ears will remind you of some of these poems.