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Distributed for Omnidawn Publishing, Inc.

Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers:

New & Selected

Poetry that imagines how to live with realness, creativity, and vibrance.

The poems in Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers speak to the emotionally and existentially tough challenge presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy: “It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task.”Filled with wit, color, and high-spirited invention, these selected poems offer no room for softness and sentiment. They carry variant voices, whispers like dramatic asides, and mind-expanding assertions as they reveal their layers and nuances. Bedient confronts disasters of politics, love, and faithless time, never turning away from the glinting axe.
 
This collection also includes new poems that are direct in dealing with the difficulties of keeping faith through life. They recognize that making something—for instance, poetry—is necessary to coach the world into realness and render oneself real in the process, a journey of both intensive investigation and creativity.
 

220 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2026

Poetry


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Reviews

“Bedient ranks among those who fearlessly, even recklessly, confront the dangerous, deadly, often ugly aspects of human existence. The abyssal and abject can be vibrantly terrifying, we learn, and ‘what doesn’t break us is nothing.’ With a most visceral, nuanced lexicon, he meditates upon a variety of inter-stitched subjects—the holocaust, family deaths, madness, isolation, rape, and other great griefs. Bedient balances his excursions into the worst with playfulness and invention; Gertrude Stein feels like his true and inexhaustible Penelope. These poems are almost unbearably human, risking the edge with glee and deeply earned brilliance.”

Susan McCabe, author of "I Woke a Lake"

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