a successful disaster

Patrick Dobson’s a successful disaster takes readers on heartbreaking tour of the end of a long relationship. The speaker of the poems knows divorce is eminent and that like a 'jagged knife across an apple,' 'time doesn’t heal all wounds.' The poems draw magnificently on the seasons and the natural world to heighten the reckoning the poet has with the loss of his perceived constants. Readers may recognize their own losses as Dobson notes 'We huddle and wrap our arms around each other one last time before the end of winter and the beginning of new lives separate, incomplete, no longer whole.' The collection is seamless, potent, and cathartic. It is a poignant meditation on the second half of life. --Beth Gulley, author of In the MarginsSelf-examination is a type of excavation when buried in hardship. a successful disaster catalogues 'Vagaries, challenges, issues, problems,/whatever they’re called these days/piled up.' Showing the extent one must go to exhume themself after the hardest Winter of their life. Patrick Dobson’s poems unbury the heartbreak, disappointment, and reality of divorce. A collection of survivalist stories dug out of loss, estate sales, a parent’s lament, and work injuries. An unflinching view into private disasters. -Huascar Medina, author of Protest as Love PoemThis book is raw confession, condemnation, requiem, and a lamentation of the dissolution of a marriage, the cardinal sin of divorce. This rumination is encompassing and unrelenting. In the yard a rose bush dies after a banner year, a thorny promise. Inside carpets grow bare, walls sag, the cold drafts in. A body succumbs slowly to the vagaries of age. A stout union dissolves in word play, 'you do you, I do me,' with no 'we,' creating 'a chasm so dangerous to cross we don’t dare.' This is not a road map to resolution but a mandatory sojourn to all the other cardinal sins committed, omitted, demanding contrition. In the end resolution comes in acceptance of loss. 'This could’ve been different, a life continued until death.'--Jose Faus, author of Life and Times of Jose Calderon