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Bruce Lader’s fifth book of poetry, Fugitive Hope, "is an astonishing journey, beautiful and hopeful." His fourth book, Embrace, is about the need for love and intimacy. His first full-length book, Discovering Mortality, was a finalist for the Brockman-Campbell Award. Landscapes of Longing, presents political, social, and personal perspectives on justice. He has published poems in over 100 international journals and anthologies, including Poetry, the New York Quarterly, the Humanist, CircleShow, International Poetry Review, Harpur Palate, New Millennium Writings, Margie, Poet Lore, Asheville Poetry Review, and Against Agamemnon: War Poems anthology. Winner of the 2010 Left Coast Eisteddfod Poetry Competition, he has received a writer-in-residence fellowship from The Wurlitzer Foundation and an honorarium from the College of Creative Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. A New York City teacher for many years, he is the founding director of Bridges Tutoring, an organization based in Raleigh, North Carolina, educating multicultural students.
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You can order from the Books page link securely via Paypal.
Or email the author at BridgesBL@aol.com
Visit http://www.redroom.com/author/bruce-lader for more information.
Bruce Lader'’s new collection, Fugitive Hope, begins with attractive, jazzy pizzazz and over four sections deepens, broadens, and sweetens, as a pastoral symphony might, into gratitude for life, nature, and his wife, who bears the mysteries of faith and hope. In the lovely "“Hide & Seek,"” the speaker is only “certain of this abracadabra / moment ludicrous with / giddy freedom.” Witty and cutting, “"Memo from Another Planet"” imagines Earth’s quick, quiet capitulation to conquest. Near book’s end, we are listening to “covert concerts in these woods,” and in “"Vision of Uncertainty,"” the poet dreams of seeing spring’s advent in his wife’s eyes after his death. It is an astonishing journey, beautiful and hopeful.
—Kelly Cherry, The Retreats of Thought: Poems
In Fugitive Hope, Bruce Lader is an adept guide covering the vast territory of this fresh, lively collection. He offers compelling, sympathetic portraits of a wide range of individuals, from soldiers to judges, from Diogenes to Orpheus. A skilled craftsman, he knows just when to pull up at the end of his poems, put on the brakes, and send us flying.
—Jim Daniels, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry
These are tightly structured, tightly controlled poems profuse with passion and a sometimes hidden but always savage lust for life, formed of "the legacy of gargoyle and...of cherubs hovered in balance."
—Jared Smith, The Collected Poems of Jared Smith: 1971-2011
—Kelly Cherry, The Retreats of Thought: Poems
In Fugitive Hope, Bruce Lader is an adept guide covering the vast territory of this fresh, lively collection. He offers compelling, sympathetic portraits of a wide range of individuals, from soldiers to judges, from Diogenes to Orpheus. A skilled craftsman, he knows just when to pull up at the end of his poems, put on the brakes, and send us flying.
—Jim Daniels, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry
These are tightly structured, tightly controlled poems profuse with passion and a sometimes hidden but always savage lust for life, formed of "the legacy of gargoyle and...of cherubs hovered in balance."
—Jared Smith, The Collected Poems of Jared Smith: 1971-2011
Book review excerpt
Embrace
Bruce Lader
Big Table Publishing Company
ISBN: 978-0-9842473-6-3
The word that overhangs Bruce Lader’s Embrace is “abundance.” The word itself is repeated only a couple times in the collection, but each poem speaks to the plenty in the lives of its featured couple. There’s a profusion of life—vegetation in the garden, bees at flower buds, birds at the feeder, the vivacity of the couple’s romance. Sex and the garden come together—with all the life they entail.
Lader makes it easy to dwell in his work. This is a book for those who want to inhabit a lovely space for 32 pages. It’s a feel-good read. Its situations and themes are repeated, creating a closed system, a sheltered paradise.
As is clear from the book’s cover, which features a man and woman sculpted in an embrace, the collection is of love poetry. Lader speaks of his own love life—capturing the sex and companionship he shares with his wife. He also occasionally writes love letters; addressing tenderly the “you” he references in poems like the sensual “3:00 A.M. Dinner”:
We went over every mouth-watering item on the menu,
you know the bill of fare I have in mind,
all of them were tempting,
none of them would keep.
So I got up, prepared your favorite hors d’oeuvre,
you know the saucy one that was,
it only urged on our appetite,
so we mixed together an entrée
(and juicy sides of other things)
The complete review by Janelle Adsit is in the August 2010 issue of Pedestal Magazine http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=12949
Bruce Lader
Big Table Publishing Company
ISBN: 978-0-9842473-6-3
The word that overhangs Bruce Lader’s Embrace is “abundance.” The word itself is repeated only a couple times in the collection, but each poem speaks to the plenty in the lives of its featured couple. There’s a profusion of life—vegetation in the garden, bees at flower buds, birds at the feeder, the vivacity of the couple’s romance. Sex and the garden come together—with all the life they entail.
Lader makes it easy to dwell in his work. This is a book for those who want to inhabit a lovely space for 32 pages. It’s a feel-good read. Its situations and themes are repeated, creating a closed system, a sheltered paradise.
As is clear from the book’s cover, which features a man and woman sculpted in an embrace, the collection is of love poetry. Lader speaks of his own love life—capturing the sex and companionship he shares with his wife. He also occasionally writes love letters; addressing tenderly the “you” he references in poems like the sensual “3:00 A.M. Dinner”:
We went over every mouth-watering item on the menu,
you know the bill of fare I have in mind,
all of them were tempting,
none of them would keep.
So I got up, prepared your favorite hors d’oeuvre,
you know the saucy one that was,
it only urged on our appetite,
so we mixed together an entrée
(and juicy sides of other things)
The complete review by Janelle Adsit is in the August 2010 issue of Pedestal Magazine http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=12949
Book review excerpts
Reading from Landscapes of Longing
In Landscapes of Longing. . . One poem after another proposes answers to the question: what can we learn from each other, from our lives as human beings, from the inevitability of disappointment, despair, longing in all its innumerable varieties. . . By writing about longing, failure, persistence, and perspective, Lader writes honestly, unflinchingly, about what it is to be human.
--Scott Owens, Editor of The Wild Goose Poetry Review
...Lader manages to pull off some amazing and difficult things. For one, he writes from a place different from almost all other contemporary American poets. Creating poems fueled not by the confessional depths or natural world, but sweltering urban scenes and the outer fringes of the political podium, which rarely lends itself to good poetry. He also manages to reinvent Greek Mythology in a way that is tangible to anybody who has ever picked up the morning news, an equally difficult task.
Despite a few shortcomings, his is a noble task that has been handled with relative grace. Mr. Lader is something of a Sisyphean figure himself, writing a poetry of hard reality that prefers to continue to fight through the nitty-gritty world of matter instead of taking a one-way rocket to the vatic heights.
...Landscapes of Longing is a worthwhile read that could very well be the precursor to something very unique and interesting in modern poetry. This reader will certainly keep an expectant eye on Mr.Lader’s future work.
--Seth Jani, Editor of CircleShow and publisher of
SevenCircle Press
Book review excerpts
Featured reading from Discovering Mortality
Discovering Mortality is a book you should read. . . .Especially poignant is "Sabotage," a short but complicated poem about Lader's relationship with his father. . . .
--Joe Benevento, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Poetry Editor
. . . In Discovering Mortality, Bruce Lader gives the reader an entry into private lives and their dealings, told in vivid language that resonates because of the commonality, as in the poem "Testamentary." It is his war poems, such as "Empty" or "Fragments of War" that stay with the reader: "The gunman aims,/ a bullet screams/ and faster than the gods/ guided Achilles,/ a body enters earth,/ silent on impact/ as the echo of an asteroid."
--Robert L. Giron, editor of the Poetic Voices Without Borders anthology
--Joe Benevento, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Poetry Editor
. . . In Discovering Mortality, Bruce Lader gives the reader an entry into private lives and their dealings, told in vivid language that resonates because of the commonality, as in the poem "Testamentary." It is his war poems, such as "Empty" or "Fragments of War" that stay with the reader: "The gunman aims,/ a bullet screams/ and faster than the gods/ guided Achilles,/ a body enters earth,/ silent on impact/ as the echo of an asteroid."
--Robert L. Giron, editor of the Poetic Voices Without Borders anthology