Poetry. Launched by words ‘fragile and ragged / as broken marbles’ Bruce Covey’s poems make huge leaps from thought to thought, instant to instant, presenting the pressures of the extreme contemporary in a new, vibrant, and often wry light. In striking images (a ten-pound honey-globe melon travels atop a tiny red wagon), Covey captures the sublime absurdity that reigns all around us. Such as having 36,245 email messages… or trying to carve your initials into a penny with an awl. Punning ingeniously on change and exchange, Covey highlights an intricate economy of the contemporary that passes in an animating circuit–almost electric–through technology, society, and personal desire.–Cole Swensen
The best poems are fresh technologies so we get it, we get the world the whole world, what is this thing? ‘let’s say I stick my shovel / Into the ground–’ Resources we stick it into, standing on gemstones, bouquets of smokestacks, Bruce Covey is the very best kind of poet cutting open everything to show us ourselves in the sinew and grit. I’m always grateful to a poet who shows me myself in you, in the lake, in the dust. The title of Covey’s amazing CHANGE MACHINE will mean more to you by the time you have finished reading it.–CAConrad
Enchanted by the actual, Bruce Covey’s poems are made of calcium, vitamin C, pi and electricity shipped on trucks. Covey is a poet who has not lost his sense of childlike wonder and he invites us to dissolve in his extraordinary findings. From the safest places for fucking to the constellations, hydraulics to the infinite and its intersections, CHANGE MACHINE dwells–with great empathy and humor–in the realm where the terrestrial and poetic worlds collide.–Melissa Broder
The poems in CHANGE MACHINE read like an EKG of the hive mind, lit with spikes of lyric elevation. Addressed to a lover, a reader, a digital assistant or NSA-bot, Covey’s speedy lyrics patch together a ‘little garden full of digits, ’ the poem as dream-solution or as widget.–Joyelle McSweeney
Bruce Covey’s CHANGE MACHINE energizes the mind’s eye with an exciting kind of nowness in his language: full of witticisms and theories [my simultaneous heart / Is a sentence fragment] that try to define–or rather diagram–our present tense and its oncoming futurity, kind of like a sci-fi Ted Berrigan. His Frank O'Hara ‘oranges are already peeled.’ The difference, however, in styles, is the authority of the poems: they want more authority rather then less, and to unearth late 20th and 21st century language, discovering the particular acquisitions that keep the speaker perplexed and yet committed to seeing and affecting singular truths. This is a terrific collection of poems.–Prageeta Sharma
