Description
American author Tom Bradley’s epic poem Nagasaki Soul Huffer is a literary tour de force that hurls the reader deep into the author’s magical universe. It’s a world composed of absurdist twists and turns, surreal hurdles, and a take-no-prisoners approach to liberating the reader from whatever expectations may have existed at the outset. Bradley’s powerful blank verse will shake your entire being, and won’t let go until you’ve succumbed to the experience of existing in a parallel and relentlessly poetic universe from which you will find yourself looking out instead of in.
”The Soul Huffer” of the title is an enormous man, exiled in Nagasaki. He’s matrilaterally descended from an earlier Nagasaki expatriate, Thomas Glover, the “Scottish Samurai.” Known as the Founder of Modern Japan, Glover engaged in heavy industrial pursuits which eventually attracted the second atom bomb. The Soul Huffer has undertaken certain esoteric activities as atonement for this hereditary guilt. From the top of an extinct volcano in the city’s suburbs, he inhales the atomized bits of “nukees,” then—
Expelling hopeful, naked little beings
on gales cyclonic as Gargantuan throat
and trampoline-broad diaphragm can blow,
Sam launches them on greenhouse-gaseous wings
as far as superhumanly he can
across deepwater inlets of the bay,
beyond the piers, avuncular breakwaters,
the moles and causeways, toward East China Sea,
to hatch afresh with jellyfish and polyps
and un-Linnaean isotopic mutants
from Fukushima’s farce lately adrift.
Trapart Books, 2024, 148 pages, 6 x 9.” Available in paperback, hardback and e-book editions.
Further curiosity can be satisfied at tombradley.org.
