Days of Unwilling

In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient’s third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient’s signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn’t let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.