In Brawl & Jag, her most personal and accessible collection to date, with poems that are by turns playful, sorrowful, and sharp-edged, April Bernard explores subjects ranging from childhood anger to adult grief, from a museum of skulls to the Western movie genre to “the experiment / some amateurs mixed / of white fizzing democracy / with smoky purple capitalism.” Also included are poems that channel the voices of the sixteenth-century queen “Bloody Mary,” a girl living in tsarist Siberia, filmmaker Werner Herzog, and a comically odd (and invented) twentieth-century Italian poet.


From “Anger”:


I always lie when I always say

I didn’t know the gun was loaded.