Brain Camp

Charles Harper Webb delights in disorder; no byte of arcane data is off-limits to his hyper-creative imagination as he performs linguistic feats of mind-stretching magnitude. He delights in order as well. In Brain Camp he expertly weaves together personal anecdote, pop culture, and high lyric emotion with seemingly inexhaustible insight into the human condition as we daily experience it.

Charles Harper Webb remains a dynamo of high spirits, a poet whose steadfast exuberance suggests a kind of poetic ease. But anyone who has read Webb knows his enthralling poems are always shaped by an intelligence that is both disciplined and intrepid. The title Brain Camp, of course, implies as much. Imaginative, sly, and perceptive: these new poems show why Webb is one of our great wisecracking wise men, 'a prophet whose best answer is, 'We'll see.' This is a terrific collection.

As it turns out, there is a poetry equivalent to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Charles Harper Webb's poems zig and zag through real and imaginary constructs, with language as the vehicle that hurdles the reader through experience in all its gorgeous weirdness. Webb constantly threatens to throw back the motorcar's restraining bar, because there is no safety, in his world, from the vagaries of passion, joy and fear. His poems fling the reader into realms of heaven and hell, and there is Webb, saying: I was here.

[Webb is] a real wisecracker whose poems shimmer with wit. He's full of an exuberant whimsy, his brain on steroids, often wise, and nothing if not entertaining. 'Brain Camp' certainly offers a welcome vacation for anybody looking to be intellectually amused by a guy with a gift for making fun of things."