You Don't Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis

PRAISE FOR CACONRAD'S (SOMA)TICS: CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed by love, and a tenderness for the ravages and tumult of existence -- Eileen Myles PRAISE FOR CACONRAD'S (SOMA)TICS: CAConrad's poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious -- Tracy K. Smith PRAISE FOR CACONRAD'S (SOMA)TICS: At a time when I don't always know how to make sense of what's going on, CAConrad serves as a cleareyed seer -- Jillian Steinhauer In what is now the classic CAConrad mode of both exuberance and defiance, this book, like much of Conrad's epical body of work, is a tremendous ball of fire hurled into the dark recesses of our worlds (minds?). Luminous, sobering, but not without a capacious kindness in its ethos, this latest is a vibrant achievement from one of America's most legendary living poets -- Ocean Vuong These are psychotropic, visionary songs of love and defiance. CA celebrates poetry as a connecting force, a spell-work which binds us to the earth, animals, stars, and one another -- Ralf Webb CAConrad's work is as tough and as vulnerable as our bodies, as intricate and blunt as a flattened copper penny or a lily of the valley or the nests we'd build if we were birds. There's a love poem here for Jim Brodey, who once talked about poems bursting apart with 'extreme gracious information'. Right? Gleaming like a mineral in the contemporary nightmare, that's what this book is made of: through and through -- Luke Roberts I've been a fan of CAConrad's work from the beginning. There is always a necessary and vital life force at work in this poetry. This is a wondrous and essential selection of their noble life project -- Peter Gizzi