COLD CALLING
Andrea Brady

Poems in transit, moving outward from Vacation of a Lifetime toward new articulations of permanent war.

'A genuinely remarkable, desperately important pamphlet...She employs techniques and aspects of style that might remind you of Gertrude Stein (unexpected stammers and break-neck switches), or of Veronica Forrest-Thomason (an equally unexpected lyricism).  Where Brady seems radically different is in the ends to which these devices are used.  Despite the allusive and elusive qualities, this is a poetry operating in a fundamentally public sphere.' --Stuart Kelly, Poetry Review (Summer 2004)

1-903488-33-8. 2004. £4.00 / $8.00

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Cold Calling 

On the other end a waitress
to claim your offer, read the number beginning
with B slip from the claim.
Fiddles zip like insects, and your time
falls onto the weigh-tray as translucent scales.

You just can’t trust yourself with them
but are the cheeks bacchic
or tropic illness?  What any
end of any line you might get a buyer,
snap your shells around a bauble
hotter than the sun.
You fall to sky, 95% pure space

in a kind of jelly.  Though you quote the
evening standard dust explodes
outward from the terrace.  Imagine
riding a grain with a camera
and you’re hoping soon to land in
an ear, twitching like free peoples.
Is that the exchange you wanted?

You turn towards a killer wave, hanging crystal
fx between you and the house,
force all of air.  Off goes
the skin on your face.
It is not the identity of days in touch
but their diversity that ruins us. 

Fullness... that’s another one that’s gone
out of fashion, with the bonnet
and the gold head it protected –
full of free attributes,
bold range, still breathing and willing to
atone.

also available: Vacation of a Lifetime
Cambridge and Applecross, Australia: Salt 2001.
144 pp.  ISBN 1-876857-16-1.  GB£7.95, US$12.95, CAD $16.95, AUD $19.95. 

Order from Salt Publishing, Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

"Freedom to move through different gears allows the recycling of different registers to overlap without straining the juxtaposition of local word games and harsh political realities. The fire power generated by torpedoes of excess is just what these poems need and theres plenty of transgression. If some of the poems relate to news stories whose urgency has faded in the light of subsequent events, theres still something new about the sense of a political testament, a record of what it means to face up to the problems of the present. This book is not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a while to find ways into the brasher surfaces, but it is a rare example of a book of poems where the struggle between political radicalism and poetic form is worth sharing. Despite its title, Vacation of a Lifetime is no holiday." --Keith Elliot, Terrible Work

"Effecting an off-site sifting of virulently sexualized, life-style-propping policies that kill people, Andrea Brady takes readers on a Vacation of a Lifetime, her first book of poems. An American poet now teaching in London, Brady works past First World lies and representations, taking idioms and ideology and warping them back from outside: “bullets/ bought by staff at the heart shaped cafe.” Throughout, the book’s deep engagement with lyric as valid and viable cultural expression, despite its imperial history in English, evinces a belief in imagining other truths: “If you can reach/ to pull your presents toward you, I am there/ at the breaking point, floodlit with you and different/ as the world is now: I found/ for you a brighter hemisphere." --Publishers Weekly

Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia, USA in 1974.  She studied at Columbia and Cambridge, and is now Lecturer in Renaissance literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where she is director of the Archive of the Now. She has written extensively on early modern poetry and ritual, as well as on contemporary British and American poetry. Her most recent book, Embrace, was published by Object Permanence in September 2005. She has given public readings in venues throughout the UK, US and Canada. A page describing her work is available at the British Electronic Poetry Centre.

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