“How does sound assemble meaning, assemble relationships across time lines, patterned, steeped, torn and adorned? David Bradford’s lyric compositions and decompositions perform narration erasures, narrating to unnarrate, visual, textual–and to somehow also live again in language, in consideration and construction, as recognition’s dream.”–Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure

“In Dream of No One but Myself, the structural instability of a dream is mapped onto a family. It is then reflected in the mutability of poetic form. A father’s estrangement pulls a child into contradiction, toward desiring connection while straining away from that connection. Poetic form also strains, stretches from prose poems in compact rhythmic units to disjunctive works that slice across the page, to suites of anguished, cut-up family photographs and beautifully abstract, decomposing erasure works that bloom into ruinous new shapes. These formal strategies are never forced; rather, they establish a narrative that doubles – that infuses and is transformed by–the Dream of No One but Myself.“–Kaie Kellough, author of Magnetic Equator

“Perhaps I would have held my breath for the entirety of this text if not for the wisp and grey, the ventilation surfacing in tide pools of visual poems–bramble relief against whiteout smears–watercolours, combed thru brunt and backhand. The poet’s vision, the constant footnote to a whole contingency, manages to bear, be bearable, to be here, to pull through, and with, “survivor-survivor” narratives held carefully and hauntingly. Much love and relation to the composite shards, difficult folds and dovetail joints Bradford realizes in this important book.”–Cecily Nicholson, author of Wayside Sang