A DARK CORNER OF PARADISE

Bradley’s raw collection combines stories and poems about a brutal childhood, military service, and life in a flophouse.

“My home state, Kentucky, is like some weird b-movie about travelling in time to the past,” the author writes in an essay about his earliest years and his attempts to resolve his feelings about where he spent them. It’s a place where, as a child, he kissed a Black girl and an old lady called him “white trash,” as he notes in a poem titled “Trash.” He tells of his violent father abusing him and of his father’s third wife’s slamming his hand in a car door. In another poem, he describes his father’s untimely end: “My father died at 41 years old / of heart disease / or karma, / or whatever you want to call it.” Drawing on memories of a combat stint in the Army in the Middle East, he rails against a military that wants emotionless killers but sends them back into society with no preparation. Accounts of years of drug abuse in a Corpus Christi, Texas, flophouse follow, including a nine-year relationship with a Mexican woman who was a blackout drunk: “If I had a dollar for every time she threw up on me, I’d have about ten dollars.” Reflections on this era include a story about a meeting with an old sex-worker friend who died days after their reunion, causing the author to conclude: “There is almost no redemption.” Over the course of this collection, Bradley’s in-your-face, no-regrets style allows him to paint a fiery portrait of an anti-establishment personality who has ample reason to dislike the police, the government, and abusers. The people in these pages live in a hard-luck universe where the author learned to live by his own rules. The childhood stories are the most chilling ones here, and they seem to inform his perspective in other pieces, although his adulthood brought ample hardship as well. There’s a bit too much bragging about sexual prowess, though, and the poetry feels thin and lacks substance when compared to the essays.

A tenacious, concise collection of vignettes with a fierce attitude, although some parts feel underdeveloped.