Bandana Wasteland

Carly Bryson is a native Texan raised in the oilfields of west Texas somewhere between the Edwards Plateau and the Guadalajara desert. Currently residing in Houston, she writes poetry and prose dealing with politics, current events, nature, and family dynamics. She has been published in Carcinogenic Poetry, Calliope Nerve, The Shine Journal, ETC: A Review of General Semantics as well as two anthologies, and NothingNoOneNowhere. Bandana Wasteland is her first collection of poetry and contains poems which address an increasingly dystopic and Orwellian society forming amidst an age of war, disinformation, media bias, environmental decline and propaganda.

Reviews

"Bryson's poems reek of Texas. Each piece is imbued and informed by a landscape which tests, but never tames her protagonists. In scenes sharply observed, her characters move through an adversarial world and while her narrators may not know for what they search, they are never without a moral compass. This ain't chick lit, kids. It's the human situation."
-Doc Sigerson, poet, essayist and translator

"The intense sensory details and arid landscapes Bryson paints with language will have readers reaching for a cold libation, then swimming in it. Picturesque, haunting and sublime is the wisdom woven into the tapestry that is Bandana Wasteland."
- Apryl Skies, author of A Song Beneath Silence

"Carly Bryson's poetry is as gritty and deadly serious as the "bandana wasteland" and "big fried empty" of drought-stricken Chihuahua Desert, and as dense, humid and fecund as the "gauzy shadows" and "moss levees" of the bayous and delta of the Atchafalaya Basin. She captures the stark truth of life in both these dissimilar areas of her homelands that stretch from far West Texas to where Louisiana meets the Gulf of Mexico."
- Donna Snyder, author of I Am South