Trancelumination

"Trancelumination is unlike any other book I've encountered in American poetry. What a wild and crazy book. What a wonderful book! Trapped somewhere between poetry and the wisdom found in Chinese fortune cookies is the territory of the aphorism and John Bradley finds his way there again and again in these brilliant shards that shine like mica in a sidewalk. These are truly a delight to read, to savor, to return to. 'Ok, it's been fun, but now back to wordlessness,' John Bradley writes. But, please let's not rush back to wordlessness too soon!"

-- Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings

"Drop a penny into Trancelumination and receive a fortune scrawled by a teller whose clairvoyance is as clouded as it is terrifying and beautiful. Often drunk on language, these fortunes arrive in the form of aphorism, joke, horror, hallucination, and lie. The reader is warned: 'don't wear socks spun from human flesh' because in this world what feels impossible to bear is a heart-wrenching possibility. It is John Bradley's gigantic imagination that saves and destroys this world (and its fortunes) over and over again."

--Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Tsim Tsum

John Bradley's aphorisms are mundanely magnificent and nonchalantly sublime, like cracking open a fortune cookie to find not a saying but a symphony orchestra.

-James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists