C.L. Bledsoe s savage, hallucinatory, and ironic third chapbook Leap Year by Red Ceilings Press opens a window into the mind of the insane. Taken as a whole, which is clearly the intent each of the 29 poems is titled with the date, as if the book is a journal written in February of a leap year the book reveals day-to-day life in a mental institution, blending black humor with the isolation and humiliation of an imaginative, wry speaker. Leap Year is an ambitious book, yet Bledsoe pulls it off with a masterful performance. It s utterly unforgettable.: -Elizabeth Swann, Prick of the Spindle

A book of poems by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue. Enter at your own risk, exit by your own volition. Contents may have settled during shipping and may secrete from the covers. Handle with protective gloves. The use of hazmat gear is not required but certainly would bring a smile to the authors' faces.

King of Loneliness presents innovative and accessible poems about a 21st century America caught between irony and anxiety. In his fifth book of poetry, Bledsoe uses humor and an honest eye to tour a republic whose citizens have been uprooted by media saturation, political absurdity, and personal uncertainty.

Your friend invites you to his new theme park he's opening in his back yard. Your wife has a plan to make scarves out of animals like that pop star she saw on TV wears and sell them at the flea market. A heartbroken dinosaur won't get off your couch since he broke up with his girlfriend. An apocalypse of ladybugs threatens all of humanity. The flash fiction stories in CL Bledsoe's second collection range from the surreal to the funny to the deeply moving.

The poems in CL Bledsoe's fifth collection are at turns funny and tragic, self-deprecating and deeply personal, as readers have come to expect from the author of the autobiographical collection Riceland. In Trashcans In Love, Bledsoe continues to write about the Arkansas Delta of his youth, where "we were...all looking for a place/to stick our hearts for safe-keeping" while "the boarded-over windows/of our mothers' eyes watched from graves half dug/but not full yet." Ultimately, "we aren't looking/ for tomorrow, only an eternal today."

CL Bledsoe's collection shows us a boy's perspective on a dying farm, his dying mother, and by extraction, a dying way of life. Bledsoe paints an unsparing picture of a bleak time, but manages to leave the reader with an inexplicable hope. He tells a tale in poetry about a seismic shift in the American landscape, replete with the damage done to those on the fault lines.