The Violence of the Morning maintains the force of a rushing river throughout. These poems and their figures have at their center a strategy of crisis. They implode with the precision and extravagance of life, maintaining stunning levels of complexity only a consummate craft could sustain. Again and again, Cal Bedient enters the elegy in order to render anew sorrow as we have lived it. 'A death,' he writes, 'a death is not a goodbye, not shallow smaller but a larger flickering.' There is nothing that these poems disallow. Grief is filtered through the absurd, the obscene, and the impossible distances that define intimacy. Joy is achieved in the beauty and Steinian playfulness that only a mind engaged to the world can celebrate. Bedient understands that man is an animal defined by passion, frivolity, failure and rage. Rarely is language so exquisitely taken to our depths.

—Claudia Rankine

There's no one writing like Cal Bedient. These poems are so risky and so intimately imagined: earnest, toyful, plucky, undaunted-strange, fantastic, wyrd. In these poems there is real heart and an insatiable wit as well. They are full of astonishment and desolation. To the spirit bold enough and sweet enough to have written these: I praise him. I praise him.

—Lucie Brock-Broido

Always happiest shifting tonal and emotional gears at wrenching speeds, and always honest (and gutsy) enough to let the ugliest and most unsettling faces of eros peak through the strings of his lyre, Bedient asks us, in this newest volume, to awaken yet further to the hard ancient truth of the plucked string, to the sweet and sour overtones of that plucking, to the deep fear it awakens in the listener, to the apparent jangling, apparent hooting, and the strange hope that runs its metamorphic tributary underneath.

—Jorie Graham

Bedient shows a great gift for single, striking lines. . . . Bedient is a go-to guy in poetry.

—Publishers Weekly

Bedient’s gift for startling images and vivid language propels this book forward, reminding us that even loss and grief are temporary. . . . Bedient has given us a forceful new collection.

—American Book Review