The Words We Do Not Have

In The Words We Do Not Have Steve Brisendine brings experience into sharp focus-a road trip with his son evenings spent playing pool an abused childhood classmate-along with meditative explorations of life death aging and faith. The author employs as a title for each poem an unusual foreign word (along with its definition) a strategy that unifies the collection while also yielding delightful and unexpected trajectories as the poems unfold. Brisendines imaginative lexicon offers us a space where a heart has/ spilled itself where words bloomed/ into something past words. -Janice Northerns author of Some Electric HumWe have enough wind in Kansas Steve Brisendine opens his excellent new book. When you / walk into it it pulls. Beginning with the language of wind Brisbane reveals a dark world through a series of tongues. In Mokita a classmate is abused and silent eventually dead. We learn the titles Kilivila meaning: something everyone knows but no one talks about. Outlining a slippery downhill way these grave sometimes minutial poems (as in Qarba the appearance of white hairs in a mans beard) highlight how life gives us hope of reunion . . . but also the knowledge that such might never happen. Dark global nuanced in how it reveals a gritty world. -Tyler Robert Sheldon Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and author of Consolation Prize (Finishing Line Press 2018)