Bradford Gray Telford

 

"There is no self without artifice," Bradford Gray Telford writes in Perfect Hurt, an elegant debut that somehow manages to be both restrained and luscious at once. How can such carefully patterned, structured poems engender this roiling intensity, convey such a sense of careening interiority? "A man I loved wanted to die," he writes, "and come back as a wave whereas I, I/ favored a go as that whispering scene/ from the Zapruder film, you know, that moment..." Here is a new voice that arrives as something already achieved: a presence, a consciousness: a made, unmistakeable self.

–Mark Doty