Flashcuts Out of Chaos, Poems by Charles Brice

In screenwriting, a flashcut switches scenes instantaneously, with no time for fade-ins or fade-outs. In Flashcuts Out of Chaos, Charles W. Brice poetically encounters the tumultuous era of the fifties to the present. Race relations, Conscientious Objection to the Vietnam War, the vagaries of Catholic education, life in small town America form the flashcuts that both order and create the chaos of the author’s experience. Along the way, Brice engages the subjects of love, marriage, religion, friendship, death, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and baseball, often in a simultaneously humorous, ironic, and gripping fashion.

Sample Poems by Charles Brice

“Charlie Brice is a gangbuster poet and Flashcuts Out of Chaos is filled with unique people, places, lingo, laughter tears—as well as a somewhat psychedelic youth and a fully adult adulthood. This is a powerful and sweet lava flow of a book!”—Thomas Lux, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Winner

“Flashcuts Out of Chaos is one of the most humane and winning collections I have read in recent years. Charlie Brice works his way gracefully and with tenderness through the labyrinth of a difficult and painful childhood and into an adult life of eros, love, and fulfillment. His poems make it clear that even as a boy in a parochial classroom in Wyoming he knew that daydreams can lead to the rich alternative reality of poetry. Along the way he writes about trains, whiskey, baseball, nuns, and other iconic subjects in a way that makes you glad you grew up, like Charlie in that redolent and faraway land called an American childhood.” —Richard Tillinghast, James Dickey Poetry Prize Winner

“Charles W. Brice’s Flashcuts Out of Chaos is an amazing book full of poems brimming with intelligence, wit, and compassion. His ideas and images respond to our human concerns: love, death, loss, joy. These are the strands that run through these poems, but tempered with humor and sometimes even addressed to the great thinkers whom he has encountered in books. Reading this book is like sharing a long and cozy afternoon with a person you admire and enjoy.”—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award winner

“Dazzling!” —Michael Dickman, James Laughlin Award winner

ISBN-13: 978-1625491817, 104 pages, softcover

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Also by Charles W. “Charlie” Brice:

Mnemosyne’s Hand

An Accident of Blood

The Broad Grin of Eternity

The Ventriloquist

Miracles That Keep Me Going