My 'poetry' was written at times of great happiness and love and at other times of deep sorrow and betrayal. And yet again, it was times of pure self-talk when I had to shore up my own strength and worth. So, each poem is mine and it is read, accompanied by a symphony in my mind. Each poem was written at a different time and with a slightly different 'beat' to the rhyme. Poetry must be read aloud. It may take on different meanings depending on how it is read, by whom it is read and when it is read. Poetry can be almost anything. It simply needs to be in writing with words that express feelings and ideas with style and rhythm. I thought I could do just that. It gave me an opportunity to play around with words and to search for the perfect word. It had to fit with the style and rhythm of the poem. Robert Frost said, "A poem begins as a lump in the throat." It can also begin with joy in your heart and a tear in your eye. The rest does not matter. I think I have broken a lot of rules in the English language, but then, rules are meant to be broken, at least the literary ones. That's what makes it exciting, because I can create my own rules. I can play around and do what I want. To use a pun, I do not have to have any rhyme or reason. That is freedom.

In his debut collection of poems, Conor Bracken traces the nerves of toxic masculinity—white as maggots but taut as lyre strings—that twitch and fizz inside events as homegrown as school shootings and as distant as the execution of medieval French heretics. Everywhere, though, there are bodies: the stout slouch of Henry Kissinger in a towel, a headless snake writhing in a footwell, a cantor with a beautiful voice and an inexorable need to be touched. And then there’s the body of our speaker: “white and alive and in love” and damaged by the same ravenous appetites he isn’t always able to curb. There is no hero here, only a song that turns towards and away from reckoning with the costs the neo-imperial world order extracts from bodies both supine and thrashing. These poems flicker like fire and billow like night’s velvet curtain, which you can “roughen with one hand / and smooth with the other.”

"Martin Kallich's important contribution to our knowledge of American Revolutionary verse lists and gives more reprintings of Revolutionary periodical poems than any other single bibliography."Periodical Verse of the American Revolution