Journey to the Sun

Poetry. The subtitle to JOURNEY TO THE SUN offers this summary: Wherein the Author recounts his travels, at the tender age of Thirteen, to the Source of All Life, accompanyied by his father’s employer, Mister George Westinghouse, and not neglecting the Author’s youthful opinions on the matters of Publick Education, Poetry, and Messianic Time. Frequently borrowing from the texts of long-dead authors, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Robert Burton, William Blake, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and a host of other non-contemporaries, the result is an epic poem deeply at odds with the dominant styles and concerns of its time, which itself may prove timely.

Brent Cunningham has written one of those rare, almost paradoxical books that balance the quietly luminous with the absolutely batshit. JOURNEY TO THE SUN reads like a collaboration between Judge Schreber and late Wallace Stevens–part Supreme Fiction, part Nervous Illness. I think of this book as an exploration of the wondrous folly and obstinate perseverance which it takes to write poetry in these parlous times, let alone a poetry that sets its sights beyond the dazzling horrors of our self-destructing planet.–Jasper Bernes

In his awesome second book, Brent Cunningham rhetoricizes and exclaims his way to an answer of sorts by sending the Author, a 13-year-old Everypoet, to the Source of Everything and back. Part true autobiography, part inverted Inferno, part manifesto for these End Times, JOURNEY TO THE SUN spares nothing in its manically slant indictment of the mobile class, trivia, globalization, America, ego, environmental destruction, and the state of poetry.–Anna Moschovakis