James Bradley Wells

Bicycle James Bradley Wells

Bicycle Impressionistically renders the sonnet form--sonnet stanzas, inset sonnets purling through longer poems--and bends the Renaissance medical treatise Three Books on Life by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) through the lens of Federico Fellini's art. Verging upon alchemy and integrating astrology and the science of humors derived from ancient Greek and Roman medicine, Ficino's treatise explores the relationship between melancholic temperament and creative genius. In his debut collection of poetry, Wells recruits Ficino to chart the trajectory from a dissolution "that thwarts the actual doing / with one's life what one ought to do" to a vital reverence for immanence, a quickened sensitivity to how "submarine themes of earth bind the human archipelago." Addiction crises and caustic family history eat their way into the reader's heart, then become the prima materia for revelation of an everyday order: "In states / of deprivation, there is the chance / that insight dilates and sharpens, / punches through to the grist / engrained in the mill of things."