Bad Is Bent Good
$14.99
Bad Is Bent Good by Dave Mehler is a deeply immersive, poetic exploration of life working at a landfill in Portland, Oregon. The poems are a dynamic mixture of prose poetry, haiku, sonnets, and lyric that draw readers into the gritty, suffocating environment of the dump, portraying its workers, customers, and some of the animal inhabitants. With meticulous detail and empathy, Mehler captures the harshness of the landfill workers’ lives, their resilience, and their profound humanity, portraying the characters in a raw, real way without romanticizing their struggles. While the landfill is a real place populated by garbage and the marginalized, it also becomes an abstract landscape the poet uses to explore the philosophical and metaphysical. Most of all, the landfill is a vibrant chiaroscuro—a place of despair and darkness in which the poet delves to illuminate pockets of beauty and light—making it a pertinent metaphor for the contradictions inherent in not only the human condition, but stretching figuratively even to the outer reaches of the universe.
Additional information
| PUBLICATION DATE | May 27, 2025 |
|---|---|
| FORMAT | Paperback |
| ISBN | 978-1-951547-28-8 |
| LENGTH | 158 pages |
| TRIM | 7 x 10 inches |
7 reviews for Bad Is Bent Good
Related products
-
- Poetry
Roadworthy
- $3.99 – $14.99
- Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
- Poetry
The Law of the Land
- $3.99 – $24.99
- Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
- Poetry
High Tide
- $3.99 – $14.99
- Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
- Poetry
Song of the Selkie
- $9.99 – $14.99
- Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
- Poetry
The Annotated Murder of One
- $2.99 – $13.95
- Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Bill Jolliff, author of At Rest in My Father’s House and Twisted Shapes of Light –
So ‘Dave Mehler drives a truck at a landfill in Portland, Oregon, and the poems in BAD IS BENT GOOD detail that place and its people.’ That’s a true statement, yet a statement so inadequate that it should probably qualify as a lie. With a preternatural attention to detail and dense, fastidious articulation, Mehler draws his world—and he draws us into it. Once we’re there, and once we learn to breathe the fetid atmosphere of his claustrophobic version of Gehenna, a miracle happens: we discover that his smoldering paracosm is filled with iterations of the familiar. Here they are, the very things that make our own everyday versions of the world: kindness, stupidity, empathy, vanity, brilliancy, and all the rest. And even while the worst of what we’ve thrown to the curb (human and inhuman) is being scrambled, broken, and buried in its final resting place—persistently, resiliently, triumphantly, nature breaks through in all its broken beauty. I can think of no work—even of fantasy or science fiction—that has pulled me so thoroughly into a place further from my own, or into a more fully realized not-quite-alternate reality. Bad Is Bent Good may be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read—and one of the most deeply human.
Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences and Home Burial –
The dump is where the human story goes to lie in its fragments. What could be more American than tending this particular kind of melting pot? Importantly, these poems search for meaning, but not merely through subject or social concern; rather, form and a matter-of-fact narrative gusto insist on our rapt attention. The directness, the unapologetic honoring of lives squirrelled away at the margins, and the way these poems ultimately search for human tenderness among the ruins make BAD IS BENT GOOD worthy of our highest praise. An unwavering book.
Mal Westcott –
As if everything not underwater is on fire . . .
Keith Hansen, Drywall Contractor –
I can think of no better Virgil-like guide than Dave Mehler to tour a reader through the inferno of a modern landfill; a stratified depository of smashed things and smashed lives. But though broken, not all lives are smashed. Mehler’s reporting is unsparing, yet humane. Every soul he speaks of is just that—a soul, not a mere abstraction. No matter how trapped, fractured, or just plain bored, these people are real, their unique array of hopes, fears, griefs, and small satisfactions finding their echo in the mind and heart of any attentive, empathic reader.
Philip Kobylarz, author of A Miscellany of Diverse Things and All Roads Lead from Massilia –
The writing in this collection is not only born of the labor, the love, the real people of the American Experiment, but of a genre-defying poetic reality that we can see, taste, smell, and feel, profoundly. The places these hefty, roiling, Whitmanesque poems of the land and of the open road will take you to are the normally off-limits, prohibited realms no one ever gets to know . . . from which you will never ever be able to return.
Zeke Sanchez, author of The Fire with Two Dragon Smokes: Before the Third Day and Tiger Mountain: Hispanics in the Vietnam War –
Mehler’s Bad is Bent Good is a penetrating searchlight 360° of a dump site. The poetry doesn’t descend into a fiery hell like Dante’s Inferno, but there clearly is an inferno. The dump is a pitiless landscape of discarded machines, cardboard, rotted carcasses and dashed hopes. In this place there is a defiance in the air, a ‘Fuck You’ tattooed on the neck of a worker. No need for pity from whomever might be close enough to read it. Screw the lack of medical insurance, no hopes of job advancement, the low salaries. Like the poor everywhere, the marginalized, these workers will survive somehow.
The workers recognize him as a longtime truckdriver, also a poet, who accepts their humanity, their humor and compassion for each other. Bad is Bent Good follows the men into their daily repetitive work in a landscape clouded with dust, but also brilliantly laid out against a pale blue sky at other times. I visualize seagulls flying around, and maybe a proud rat standing on a heap of rotted fruit. Did I get that from his poems, or is it the cumulative effect of the picture he constructs for us? He writes, I clock in and leave the MRF building for the breakroom but pause to look up at the telephone wires. Dawn is breaking on a Saturday, and machines are still quiet, but perching and moving about on the wires is a colony of starlings that are setting up a roar of sound and activity.
The rhythm and style is plain, Middle-American, profound, suited for the subject at hand. He takes stock of the hard lives of the men at the dump, but also notes how two giant spiders in a jar are left to starve to death while the men eat their sandwiches unconcerned. He records this without overt judgment.
Nancy Christopherson, author of The Leaf and Topping Out –
This is a book of faith, ultimately, exposing the reader, one encounter at a time, to the poet’s vision of the Divine, and one character at a time, between high energy pulses like a quasar, noumenal to phenomenal, phenomenal to noumenal, and back again. Back and forth like that. Quicksilver. A deeply humane, frank, lyrical look at life, from a collection which has the intelligence and wisdom to reference scientific texts, education enough to quote Charles Simic, Czeslaw Milosz, Dante, Shakespeare, Borges, and the imagination to explore Jupiter and Europa, and to portray leviathans of the sea and the solar system, not necessarily in that order. All the while entreating God, how can he be of service. Begs to be set free. The ultimate anguish of what it means to be human. Many of these poems are dense narratives, long-lined, lengthy prose poems, which also happen to be intensely lyrical, mystical, and personal. The poems transmit metaphysical possibilities and frequently transcend this human plane of existence. What a magical place, the landfill. I will never experience a landfill as before, ever again. Everything is there, as the poet teaches us.