Days of Unwilling

Overview

In Days of Unwilling, Cal Bedient’s third collection, a series of poems of mixed dialects and cadences weave together into a spiritual intensity that questions and queries our very existence in a universe that is spinning off its rails from the get go. Themes of art and artifice, sex and love, and even the ordinary details of life are alternately stripped down and dolled up with Bedient’s signature polyphonic wizardry. Brilliantly going where it hurts, Bedient doesn’t let up; he cuts a wild, wicked swath through each page with acumen and fecundity.

Author Biography

CAL BEDIENT is the author of two earlier books of poems, Candy Necklace (1997) and The Violence of the Morning (2002), and of five books of criticism, the latest of which is The Yeats Brothers and Modernism’s Love of Mobility (2008). He is a professor in the English Department at the University of California, Los Angeles and a co-editor of the University of California’s New California Poetry Series and of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.