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Writers & critics have praise for Unintended Lessons
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Writers & critics have praise for Unintended Lessons
"Reading this book is like sliding onto the barstool next to Luke Breit where, 'in the dark confessional of a saloon,' he'll tell you his stories -- of parents and children, friends and lovers, of the longing to connect and the ways we sometimes manage it. There's jazz on the jukebox, baseball on TV, and the next round's on Luke." --Kim Addonizio"Luke Breit's poems sound with his talking voice, a voice full of compassion, honesty, sensitivity, remembrance, stilled passions and passing life, and somehow all like parts of a novel never written..." --Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"Simplicity is the key to good design. Luke Breit constructs the incredible authenticity of his work into a powerful force by how masterfully he wields that key." --Jose Montoya
"Luke Breit's poetry speaks to the reader with tenderness, compassion, insight and honesty. His eloquent and disarming simplicity penetrates to the places that most require a poet's touch to awaken remembrance and stir those longings we had thought (and sometimes hoped) forgotten." --Midwest Book Review
"Luke Breit's poems typically leap all over the place. They are somehow like pacing about the house, one room to another -- each room seperate, made for different purposes, but part of the whole, and each holding dear pieces of us. The lover desired or won leaps into the great friend lost by distance or death which blends into the long night writing with brandy in hand becoming a beautiful child or place or simply the moment at which these things most matter, leading to the common discovery that all these are finally the same: parts, rooms, of the house in which his heart lives. He brings the poem back always from whatever source or place of departure to a lovely point, often filled with some deep universal longing, sometimes funny and poignant, sometimes stunningly melancholy and rich, but always always true to who he is as a writer and as a man. It is a house he welcomes us to." --Patrick Grizzell
"Luke Breit's poems fuse his native New York City -- for him, the heart of friendship and love -- with the California feeling of the better world that we are all in the process of creating. In Breit's works, male and female, members of his personal family and friends, all are equal to one another and yet, through his direct and intimate style, maintain their unique otherness. This is his great contribution. Few poets write with a greater sensitivity to equality. That's why you're going to read a book about the future." --Jack Hirschman
"In a recent interview, Luke Breit said that good poets work hard, and great poets work harder. Well, Luke works the hardest. Including his work in my magazine, One Dog Press, has been a blessing and a treat." --James Lee Jobe
Messages - New & Selected Poems
An Introduction by Norman Mailer
by Luke Breit
After months of working a lot, I had to work very hard for the last few weeks, and my body landed finally in the same place as my spirit--gridlock. My legs cramped when I stood up to walk. This stint came to an end about five days ago, and I have been trying to relax ever since. I've been drinking and going out with good people, but it's not been coming around all that well. After a day of catching up with correspondence (which, after months of writing, feels like ditch digging), I picked up this collection by my old friend Luke Breit, started pretty much on page one, and read most of the poems. Now a couple of hours later, my inner traffic is beginning to move forward again. Luke Breit is Doctor Breit, Traffic Consultant for locked up synapses and totally fucked-up grace. Reading his poems proved one hell of an unexpected benefit. While I knew he was good, nay, very good, since he has surprised me before by how good he is, nonetheless I had never read so many of his poems at once, and to my surprise, I think they've done what poetry is supposed to do, and even used to do until the last forty or fifty years of Western Civ began to ruin everything that curved or sagged or dripped or blew or offered you subtle shadow. Poetry used to put a little wine in your lungs with a fresh breath, and just so, I felt a little bit alive once more after reading Messages. Years ago, I wrote a blurb for Words The Air Speaks which went like this:Brooklyn, NY
"I think Luke Breit succeeds in writing with a fine edge right into the tendrils of natural change. No one does more with a mist, or the quiet desperation of a root, no young poet I know is so successfully and consistently tender without ever embarrassing the reader. Luke Breit celebrates emergence from gloom--what a nice feat. What skill in the simplicity."If Breit knows how to take us out of gloom, it is because he understands sorrow, particularly a lover's sorrow. He catches that place where paranoia is so sensuous it can ameliorate anguish before it has to increase it. Listen to these lines from "Things to Believe In":
Evenings she doesn't come are few but empty.
The furniture of the house belongs to her,
comes alive when she calls it
by name. Nights when her life
is lost in other forests, fires here
go out, blankets are tossed by no one
to the floor. The dogs believe all night
the river is her car and rip the dark with howls.I don't want to curse him with too much praise, but I think he is in the act of becoming one of the best romantic poets we've got. Which may not be as large a compliment as one suspects. How many yuppies, still worming their way along the neon moor of cancer gulch, are still romantic? Or is the compliment larger than one suspects? Perhaps. His metaphors dance and take you through turns you were not prepared for, and to your conservative consternation enjoy, because change, for once, is liberation:
In the darkness before dawn,
with the trees shaking their drenched leaves
above the roof in an erratic splatter
of sound, I move, transparent and ghostly,
through the house. Half asleep,
I am still thin with dreaming.
Light has not yet come to fill out this form,
to soak it pound by pound in the visible world,
to cover it with leaves of the real.
In boxing, there are subterranean dreams of being knocked down by blows so artfully delivered that they pound nothing out of you. The fall is free. You wake up refreshed. Breit can put three or four perceptions together in a row that have something like that effect. Some crusty old dead-ass sorrow in oneself is rejuvenated. Luke is a rainmaker. Put him in a desert, get him to recite, and clouds will gather.
In your bed, you feel
how death has plumped the pillow
and made the light bulb flutter
as if it was a candle.
You will not die tonight,
but it is closer than before.
And it is good to listen many times
to the world. It has sounds you can take
into the long silence.If I could be a poet, I wouldn't mind at all being as good as Luke Breit.
--Norman Mailer
"Luke's poems make of this world a place of beauty, an essential lonesomeness, a simplicity of theme...free of guile and full of love." --Poetry Flash
"I cannot think of a poem in this book that I would not like to quote, entice you with. (The poems create) a space to be a human being with dignity...a lovely solitude that reaches out into the world." --Barry Eisenberg, Mendocino Grapevine
"These are moving -- that is to say, perfect -- poems." --Pulitzer Prize winning poet George Oppen
"A triumph of simplicity within the most seamy and mechanical society on earth,
this book is genuine proletarian endurance." --Jack Hirschman
"A lovely sheaf of poems, quiet, honest, now and then incandescent." --Robert Mezey
"...what distinguishes Breit most of all is his tenderness, his soft spoken, unassuming ability to feel his way into his subjects and then write the results in crisp, clean language." --Sacramento Bee
"(His poetry is) wise and profound and at the same time so simple. There is something in it of ancient Chinese poetry and at the same time it is completely contemporary. In all, it has given me great joy."
--Nicaraguan poet Father Ernesto Cardenal