Candy Necklace ushers an intense new voice onto the field of American poetry. Lush and turbulent, the poems collected here expose the violence underlying all acts of union and creation, a violence for which poetry might be a redemptive language but in which language itself is always implicated. Cal Bedient explores a wide range of familiar emotional landscapes -- including the constellation of the family, love, and profound lossãand his work is always deeply intimate and verbally original. The brutality of both public and private experience finds reckoning in these intricate and majestic new poems.CAL BEDIENT is Professor of English at UCLA and author of several books of literary criticism, including He Do the Police in Different Voices (1987).

"There is a truly original and powerful mind at work in this collection. It reflects one of the most sophisticated understandings of poetic voice in contemporary poetry." -- David St. John

"Poems with an edge that makes them truly vivid and literally astonishing."-Donald Revell

"Alive in every direction . . . an altogether unexpected and brilliant poetic debut."-Robert Hass, Boston Review