I Love You but I Don't Speak Your LanguageJason BredleLabel: University of Massachusetts PressDescription: Poems that question the world with tenderness and restless introspection In I Love You But I Don’t Speak Your Language brushes with the profound may lead to brushes with the mundane or vice versa. Cause and effect become unreasoned and transcendent at times lifting the arbitrary into the sublime or the sublime into happenstance. Intuitive leaps pull us through oscillations between humor introspection and the surreal. These poems don’t follow a straight path; instead they capture the way thoughts shift contradict and collide. Inspired by the poet’s dreams as well as travels throughout central Europe the West Indies and Central and South America the poems are alive in voice and detail yet the speaker’s connections and more so disconnections turn toward isolationism solitude and loneliness. At times the collection leans into restless emotion: “I want to cry / when I think of how / I’ll look back at this moment someday / and cry. Other moments pull the reader to “a far away place / of limitless palm trees and sunsets. This is poetry that doesn’t try to fit into a traditional form. It questions observes and rethinks the world around it. Some moments might seem absurd others deeply reflective but all of them work together to create a book that is both thought-provoking and unpredictable.
