Genealogies

Brad Crenshaw’s Genealogies, an epic poem in blank verse that transgresses and transcends conventional poetic genres, is a tour de force of dazzling originality. This book-length poem concerns a sixteenth-century privateer rendered immortal by his Native American wife, and includes time travel, birdmen, genetic manipulation and a plot to assassinate the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes, with stops at a Grateful Dead concert and forays into quantum mechanics, infectious diseases, horse racing and Manichaeism, among other diversions. Part science fiction, part philosophical conjecture, Genealogies mines our literary history and contemporary philosophical and scientific investigations to create a work of astonishing range and power. The author of My Gargantuan Desire–a suite of Shakespearean sonnets presented as prose poems–once again challenges and enchants his readers with deep intelligence and a rare music.

 

An uncommonly rich panorama of the American experience, Genealogies rewards readers doubly in its narrative drive and with its supple poetry. Brad Crenshaw is funny, erotic, critical, and elegiac–not by turns but all together–in revealing local history’s abundant possibilities for tragedy and renewal. You’ll not find Hernan Cortes, Odysseus, and the ladies of the Raleigh Baptist Church together in any other story. They are here, full of life and disorder, along with pre-Cambrian mating habits, time travel, and the ironies of marriage. This is a jungle of a book: fecund, mysterious, and full of animal heat. It is a garden of a book too: beautiful and satisfying.
D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

 

A wild and cunning novel-in-verse, Genealogies features the time-traveling immortals Sarah and John Elam. epic plot lines meet lyrical invention and mordant wit: “His death is sure to fix/his rheumatism,” Sarah observes. Crenshaw’s wide-ranging knowledge–of the history of the Americas, horticulture, neuroscience–anchors his narrator, Bartlett Smith, who, with Homeric scope, vivifies the couple’s tragicomic adventures. On every page of this mesmerizing achievement, language does its deep work: it delights, it consoles, it elevates
Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron

 

Both jazzily conversational and compressed to a kind of surrealism, this time traveling poetry is funny and beautiful, full of surprises: a joy to read.
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Aurora, The Years of Rice and Salt, Red Mars