Flip Days

Using Hollywood screenplay structure to illustrate a life in three acts, eighteen scenes, each with two poems as mirrors to action, filmmaker/poet Lawrence Bridges sequences through tragicomic plot twists and subplots to create a character-driven, novel-like book of lyric poems. An unnamed protagonist is torn from a lover, torn from himself, in perpetual transition while starting a new family, surrounded by a lively array of colleagues and friends as his career implodes, asserting his autonomy only to become part of life’s “conspiracies.” Strangers shift around him in a murky world beyond his control, a world with signs of indeterminacy and happenstance: Restaurant patrons smile innocently while thieves quietly rob, a death pact is used to escape a lover, disguised signals from space aliens announce that our enemies are now their allies. How do you tie up loose ends when characters we like are actually the bad guys? Bridges prods us to answer the main question: Can a man love as his world spells farewell? A unique, delightful read an invitation to explore something new in what may be a new genre fusing some of the elements of screenplay with poetry. Today is already yesterday to tomorrow, in Flip Days.

ADVANCED PRAISE

“Dissociative Poet! Dis-sociative?! When the ruling motif is precisely the opposite, when what we are struck by, again and again and again is the intuitive wizardry of lightening associations, association, junctions, segues, startling linkages that make you see as you’ve never seen before and think as you’ve never thought before! As feel as you’ve never felt before. And very often jump out of your skin! “Our profiles are what make us look strange.” There is pure lyricism, the beautiful “Winter Object: Oath of Silence,” wherein the images are Yeatslike. Elsewhere, this lovely phrase “All the cells want to be flowers.” All the cells want to be flowers. Oh, to have written that!”—Cynthia Ozick