“So ‘Dave Mehler drives a truck at a landfill in Portland, Oregon, and the poems in BAD IS BENT GOOD detail that place and its people.’ That’s a true statement, yet a statement so inadequate that it should probably qualify as a lie. With a preternatural attention to detail and dense, fastidious articulation, Mehler draws his world—and he draws us into it. Once we’re there, and once we learn to breathe the fetid atmosphere of his claustrophobic version of Gehenna, a miracle happens: we discover that his smoldering paracosm is filled with iterations of the familiar. Here they are, the very things that make our own everyday versions of the world: kindness, stupidity, empathy, vanity, brilliancy, and all the rest. And even while the worst of what we’ve thrown to the curb (human and inhuman) is being scrambled, broken, and buried in its final resting place—persistently, resiliently, triumphantly, nature breaks through in all its broken beauty. I can think of no work—even of fantasy or science fiction—that has pulled me so thoroughly into a place further from my own, or into a more fully realized not-quite-alternate reality. Bad Is Bent Good may be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read—and one of the most deeply human.”

—Bill Jolliff, author of AT REST IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE and TWISTED SHAPES OF LIGHT

“The dump is where the human story goes to lie in its fragments. What could be more American than tending this particular kind of melting pot? Importantly, these poems search for meaning, but not merely through subject or social concern; rather, form and a matter-of-fact narrative gusto insist on our rapt attention. The directness, the unapologetic honoring of lives squirrelled away at the margins, and the way these poems ultimately search for human tenderness among the ruins make Bad Is Bent Good worthy of our highest praise. An unwavering book.”

—Michael McGriff, author of ETERNAL SENTENCES and HOME BURIAL

“As if everything not underwater is on fire . . .”

—Mal Westcott

“I can think of no better Virgil-like guide than Dave Mehler to tour a reader through the inferno of a modern landfill; a stratified depository of smashed things and smashed lives. But though broken, not all lives are smashed. Mehler’s reporting is unsparing, yet humane. Every soul he speaks of is just that—a soul, not a mere abstraction. No matter how trapped, fractured, or just plain bored, these people are real, their unique array of hopes, fears, griefs, and small satisfactions finding their echo in the mind and heart of any attentive, empathic reader.”

—Keith Hansen, Drywall Contractor

“The writing in this collection is not only born of the labor, the love, the real people of the American Experiment, but of a genre-defying poetic reality that we can see, taste, smell, and feel, profoundly. The places these hefty, roiling, Whitmanesque poems of the land and of the open road will take you to are the normally off-limits, prohibited realms no one ever gets to know . . . from which you will never ever be able to return.”

—Philip Kobylarz, author of A MISCELLANY OF DIVERSE THINGS and ALL ROADS LEAD FROM MASSILIA