Chris Bullard is a native of Jacksonville, FL. He lives in Collingswood, NJ, and works for the federal government as an Administrative Law Judge. His work appears in the current issues of Nimrod and Harpur Palate and will appear later this year in Pleiades, 32 Poems, New York Quarterly and Plainsongs. One of his sonnets was featured in the recent Tribute to the Sonnet issue of Rattle. In July of 2009, Plan B Press published his chapbook, You Must Not Know Too Much.
Reviews
Music and linguistic muscle propel Chris Bullard's poems, as well as great empathy for his many and diverse subjects. O Brilliant Kids challenges us to look closely at the world and ourselves. What more could we ask?
~ Thom Ward, The Matter of the Casket and Fog in a Suitcase
Language and the imagination are the alchemists through which the ordinary details of life can, in Bullard’s words, “shine with significance“ and shine they do in this piquant collection of astute and witty poems. The architect Bullard once thought of becoming is evident in the meticulous craftsmanship, and the judge he did become there in his sharp eye and ear for the story beneath the story being told. These are funny, heart-breaking, mature and richly human poems.
~ Christine Gelineau, Appetite for the Divine
Christopher Bullard’s poems deal with the Big Themes: aging, mortality, death, loss of height and loss of hair. But don’t despair: these poems will leave you with a bigger dose of mordancy than you can fit in a shot glass, beauty alongside terror, “the tanager / at the hanging feeder, scarlet / like fresh blood on a linen / handkerchief,” never forgetting, after all, that “the urge is always / to make dull things shine with significance.”
~ Moira Egan, Spin and Cleave
Purchase O Brilliant Kids here.
