After finishing a graduate degree, poet Steven Breyak left Boston for what was supposed to be a year abroad. After seventeen years in Osaka, Japan, he returned to the US with a wife and two children. This collection, in part, captures this chance transition.
Notices
“Breyak’s poems open into reflections that squeak through the pincers of ideology and allow us to experience again the world’s deep-down strangeness. The gods of violence stalk these poems, and daily life in our era of simulations and surveillance is registered as a netherworld between wakefulness and sleep where selfhood undergoes slippage. Quietly uncompromising, intimate and searching, these poems are sustained by a profound sensibility.”
—Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is and Tabitha, Get Up
“These marvelous poems by Steven Breyak unsettle me the way a good horror movie does, and by ‘good’ I mean a movie that is cerebral, intelligent, and even hilarious from time to time. To read them is to grow familiar with Breyak’s one big idea, which is that things are never as they seem: one poem begins, ‘Every time I turn away the details change their place,’ and that happens again and again here in endlessly enchanting ways. A man in one poem buys something but is given his change in foreign coins. The speaker in another walks in the woods behind his childhood home and discovers a tribe of little people carrying spears. Readers will identify with the personae whose baffling, alluring lives are dramatized here: in the end I felt as though I were looking at my own house but from across the street, eager to find out what the guy inside is up to.”
—David Kirby, author of The Winter Dance Party: Poems 1983–2023
“Steven Breyak’s poems bring fierce attention, piercing clarity, rigorous honesty, and warm humor to the most crucial subjects: love, loss, violence, hope, and renewal. This is a powerful, moving collection to read again and again and then send copies of to any friends who claim to not like poetry. A Song About Circles will change their minds.”
—Aaron Anstett, author of What Now
“To say modern consciousness has become surreal is to say next to nothing about our time, and that’s why we need poetry—and a poet like Steven Breyak—whose book, A Song About Circles, arrives like a lost travelogue, or the blinking light of an office phone that somebody put on hold in a long-abandoned shopping mall. Impossible to guess who might be on the other end, or, from poem to poem, where Breyak might take us next—but press the hold button and out pops a poem called ‘Federal Bureau of Domestic Drawers’ or ‘Telephone Sales of Adjustable Beds.’ Out pop, in fantastic relief, all the pulleys and gears, all the fleet efficiencies of the on-going ‘psychic epidemic’ that Carl Jung so famously warned us about—and to which we seem to offer a hapless, inexplicable thumbs up—until with humor and heart-creasing precision, Breyak draws us up short like a mad Linnaeus, say, in ‘Life Cycle of a Bullet,’ for instance, with its ‘pupa bullets … neatly shelved at every Kmart and Walmart. Oddly not Target … though odder still at certain bookstores and flower shops.’ In an era of techno-feudal overlords, ‘tiny men’ on our phones ‘paying big attention’ so that they can build … ‘in all of us: tiny thoughts of winning,’ Breyak’s poems feel less surreal and more like pure reportage, cinéma vérité. We need poems and poets that misbehave wonderfully like this, paying tribute, as Breyak does, to the surrealist poet Bill Knott, and yet building, in his own terms and with a wider lens, fantastically upon the project.”
—Mark Svenvold, author of Empire Burlesque and A Little Music for the Soft War
After finishing a graduate degree, poet Steven Breyak left Boston for what was supposed to be a year abroad. After seventeen years teaching English in Osaka, Japan, he returned in 2024 to the US with his wife and two children.