John Brehm

A new volume of original poetry from the bestselling creator of Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. In Dharma Talk, award-winning poet John Brehm explores the perennial themes of aging, compassion, emptiness, nonseparation, and more. At once poignant and humorous, Brehm's gentle, wry poems remind us that the personal and the universal are not different--and point us to the Dharma of everyday life.

With his trademark self-deprecating wit, unflinching honesty, and sparkling language, John Brehm's latest collection invites readers along on his spiritual journey. No Day at the Beach traces a progression from loneliness and the magnetic pull of the past to the grace that is found through immersion in the present and the melancholy beauty of impermanence. Informed by Brehm's Buddhist practice and enlivened by his comic insights, these poems take on a universal dimension, allowing the reader to both luxuriate in the moment and reflect on each poem's spiritual depth. By turns playfully philosophical and bracingly open hearted, Brehm's engagement with the specters of memory, pride, yearning, gain, and loss illuminate the human condition with humor and empathy.

Over 125 poetic companions, from Basho to Billy Collins, Saigyo to Shakespeare. Over 125 poetic companions, from Basho to Billy Collins, Saigyo to Shakespeare. The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy received the Spirituality & Practice Book Award for 50 Best Spiritual Books in 2017 by Spirituality and Practice Website.

Help Is on the Way takes readers from the subways of New York City to the savannas of Paleolithic Africa to the transplant ward of Kyoto University Hospital. But whatever their setting, these poems are enlivened by the subtle music, penetrating wit, and remarkable emotional honesty that won high praise for his earlier collection, Sea of Faith, and constitute John Brehm's singularly engaging voice.

In a masterful blending of lyric and narrative, Sea of Faith ranges across interior states and external worlds. From the Sierra Nevadas to New York City subways, from an imagined friendship with Lao Tzu to a meditation on Coney Island, from a comic and poignant classroom discussion to a sexual fantasy, John Brehm's poems explore the human predicament with tenderness, compassion, and humor.

Those who seek to accurately gauge public opinion must first ask themselves: Why are certain opinions highly volatile while others are relatively fixed? Why are some surveys affected by question wording or communicative medium (e.g., telephone) while others seem immune? In Hard Choices, Easy Answers, R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm develop a new theory of response variability that, by reconciling the strengths and weaknesses of the standard approaches, will help pollsters and scholars alike better resolve such perennial problems. Working within the context of U.S. public opinion, they contend that the answers Americans give rest on a variegated structure of political predispositions--diverse but widely shared values, beliefs, expectations, and evaluations. Alvarez and Brehm argue that respondents deploy what they know about politics (often little) to think in terms of what they value and believe. Working with sophisticated statistical models, they offer a unique analysis of not just what a respondent is likely to choose, but also how variable those choices would be under differing circumstances. American public opinion can be characterized in one of three forms of variability, conclude the authors: ambivalence, equivocation, and uncertainty. Respondents are sometimes ambivalent, as in attitudes toward abortion or euthanasia. They are often equivocal, as in views about the scope of government. But most often, they are uncertain, sure of what they value, but unsure how to use those values in political choices.