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Hothead is a haibun-patterned, book-length declamation in which no topic is off limits-Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, America, global warming, eros, mental illness, the natural world, technology, the aging body. Cushman's poetry shows us how to live in a world in which it is difficult to balance "the place where light and dark meet." With an outmoded laptop named Patience as his daily consort, the speaker navigates through themes of love, politics, and belief. "There's got to be someone," Cushman writes, "exploring the way," and the speaker of Hothead steps in to fill those shoes with intelligence, endurance, moxie, and humility.
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Reviews
"Hothead is a hot book. Meteoric, mercurial, sexy, and haibun-ghosted, it is a jeremiadic prayer to language ('each word a partner, each sound a move'), the planet, and the vexed and stalwart 'self.' At one point, Cushman's speaker shares with his consort, an aging laptop he's christened Patience ('Patty'), that 'we need our own genre.' This singular, arresting poem-part ars poetica, part encyclop
Lisa Russ Spaar
"Hothead renders the course of a year in a postmodern almanac of the mind, a mind brilliant, fraught, and funny. This is the poetry many have been looking for: Cushman's Hothead confronts the precariousness of language, yet its freewheeling syntax and sinuous dactyls, graced with haiku, movingly connect body to mind, earth, history, and our companions in this life."
William Wenthe
"Hothead has swallowed me alive! And Cushman's imaginative verse guides us through a world filled with friendly glasses of Fernet-Branca, torn-out chunks of a Bible, a man typing with his nose, Lewis and Clark, a sentient computer, Buddha, birdsong, and humble, real truths. When I get out, I'll pass them on as prophecy."
Nathaniel Perry