Contradictions

by Brian Glaser

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Written over a period of nearly twenty years, the poems in What an Island Knows trace the spiritual journey of a family of summer people on Chebeague Island, Maine. In the Abenaki language, Chebeague means “island of many springs”—literally, freshwater springs that nourish life. So too in this book, the narrator (and reader) discover springs that nourish life in the face of conflict and crisis. Such springs include the joys of family and community, the healing power of wild places, the seasonal rhythms of work and rest, and the balance of action and contemplation. As the narrator wrestles with universal questions of vocation, parenting, illness, and loss—seeking wisdom from nature and the ancestors—What an Island Knows poses questions that hover over the twenty-first century: What are our responsibilities to the land and planet? To indigenous people and future generations? How does the local entwine with the global? How do we age with dignity and grace? Can we reclaim the wonder of childhood? What might nature teach us about how to live, and lean into the future with radical hope? 

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-962082-25-9 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2024941263

152 pages

Author Biography

Brian Glaser was born in Detroit, Michigan, the eldest of two children of Jack Glaser, a theologian, and Mary Ellen Glaser, an educator and social worker. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003, he married dancer and choreographer Melanie Ríos, with whom he has two children, Andoe and John. In 2005, he joined the faculty at Chapman University, where he currently teaches in the department of English. His previous poetry collection, All the Hills, was published by Shanti Arts Publishing in 2019.

Endorsements

“Contradictions invites us to take part in a sensuous journey of discovery. Precise observations of the ordinary lead us into thoughtful meditations on art, religion, nature, joy, justice, violence, and ‘the human project of morality.’ The ease with which this book connects the keen experience of physical reality with the diversity of philosophical issues is awe-inspiring. One can only congratulate Brian Glaser on his achievement of keeping ‘the embers of the sacred flame of poetry alive.’”
—Georg Schiller, author of Symbolische Erfahrung und Sprache im Werk von Gertrude Stein

“Brian Glaser is a spiritual seeker, which involves continually testing wisdom from several spiritual traditions. But the major emphasis is on an effort to produce as absolute a clarity as possible about elemental features of his life—natural, personal, familial, social, and political. Innocence becomes as fundamental as air; desire as fundamental as water. So poetry itself has to renounce metaphor and elaborate form in order to hew as closely as possible to honest renderings of surprising moments where the shadows lift and the mind responds to something worth enduring. These moments seem utterly bare. The poetry resides in the resonance of what comes to matter as it just comes into language, often weaving sites of contradiction that also serve as means of recognizing how intractably solitude, social pressure, and familial ties serve to foster one another. Poetry becomes a process of imagination ceaselessly adjusting to shifts in possibilities of responsiveness. And the moral life becomes inseparable from fostering careful attention to what creates and binds our passions.”
—Charles Altieri, author of Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience; professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

News and Reviews

Beth Jacobs, “Review of Contradictions by Brian Glaser,” Journal of Poetry Therapy, March 23, 2021
This book of poems uses poetic technique, intellectual material, memory, and emotion in unexpected and moving originality. Like a good teacher, the poems come right at the reader with bald questions and make the reader struggle with them. The reader doesn’t feel alone though. The quest for “inventive solutions to intractable questions” is shared painfully, humorously, and with great tenderness. We are left with a wry wisdom and raw elements, in a space between all thought, where the real activity occurs silently.