Behind the Wall Cloud of Sleep

'Steve Brisendine is a guide ever pushing with a gentle urgency necessary to guide somnambulists to safety in these fitful nights. Restlessly toss and turn through the sheets of this surreal collection of poems and share in Brisendine’s personal twilight apocalypse, our own apocalypse. Hallucinatory visions are grasped and captured, forced to be concrete and to be used to build skyscrapers looming like omens and laid as pavement for highways through the world that is not the world. Turn your heavy eyes Behind the Wall Cloud of Sleep. There you will find a vivid disquiet that shakes you from your waking slumber and will haunt you within your own dreams.'-Jonathan S Baker, co-author of Centaur 'Is each of the poems in Steve Brisendine’s Behind the Wall Cloud of Sleep a real dream? If yes, I envy his dream recall. If no, then he’s damn good at what Beat visionary Brion Gysin achieved with his flickering Dream Machine-a loose flow of surreal visions and odd juxtapositions. People run all night along I-70, leaving behind 'mushroom clouds' that 'bloom and boil.' Young and old Clint Eastwood sit together at a table. The local craft store has an aisle with shrines to Norse gods. A diner in New York eats a hamburger that 'heals itself of each bite.' The weirdness of these poems delights me! I accept it all, no matter how bizarre, thanks to Brisendine’s straightforward diction, which mimics the way nothing in our dreams surprises us while we’re dreaming. Brisendine offsets the disorder with map points, names, and titles that inform us a place is not really that place.  His attention to craft is evident in pleasing sonics, economic use of language, and deft inclusion of sensory details. He pulls us start to finish with wry humor and by repeating places and themes such as nuclear fission, golf, teeth, the direction west. It’s not easy to write a world that’s shifted just a few degrees from waking life, and Brisendine does just that, letting us into his strange dreamscape via these spare, spiraling poems. Definitely a collection to read several times over!' -Lynne Jensen Lampe, author of Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022)