Presidential Busts with Jesus

I've been reading Jason Bredle's In Line for the Beast over the last few days, and the last few days have been pretty good. His poems are like rolling down a hill: you know that an end to the rolling will soon exist, but you have no idea when it will come, and in the mean time you've got nothing to do but roll, man, roll. Each of this poems delivers an entirely fulfilling ending that only afterwards seems inevitable. For you sports enthusiasts out there, imagine the bottom falling out of sinker just as you get all your momentum behind the bat. You know you're swinging at air, you know why you're swinging at air, but you still can't believe you're swinging at air.

Jason Bredle is the poet I've often imagined myself being...one who operates in the most colloquial of languages, but still managing to create an immediate and genuine response with the reader. His poems are so rapid fire its often easy to imagine yourself being talked at by two people simultaneously. Two people that happened upon you in a dead sprint, whom you are constantly reminding to breathe. It seems lame to call what Bredle does "stream of conscience," because that isn't really what he does, especially in the modern sense in which it was developed, but he does have a conversationally rambling tone to his voice that I really admire, and that seems authentic to me. In fact Mathias Svalina has a really good post on his blog regarding this exact phenomenon here: http://mathiassvalina.blogspot.com/2008/03/
i-was-talking-to-my-friend-dave-carillo.html#links

You should also check out his videos from the clean part reading series, heck, I'll even make it easy for you...

Long story short, go and look at Jason Bredle, but don't stare, it makes him nervous. As a matter of fact, maybe you should just go to his website, it can be found here: http://www.knifemachine.com/

He's also giving a reading here in Chicago, the info proper looks like this:
WEDNESDAY, 4.2.08, 8:00 PM
Reconstruction Room Series
at Black Rock Bar
3614 N. Damen Ave., Chicago, IL.