breakfast

Praise for Coleman Stevenson & Breakfast:

Breakfast. Washing the dishes. Gardening. Home. Nature. The weather. Coleman Stevenson takes the prosaic and transforms it with unexpected, yet true-feeling juxtapositions—‘rainbows, gasoline halos’—and philosophical stabs of mystic aloneness: ‘Some stones slide easily across a pond / some sink’; ‘You keep me like a secret, even from yourself.’ Her work vibrates everywhere with life and loss: part elegy, part dying to be born again. She herself claims at one point to be ‘held together by lightning’. Her poetry is that illuminating force striking right through and out of her.

— Mark Mordue, author Dastgah: Diary of a Head Trip

In the Fifties, Frank O’Hara daily went to lunch, taxis lurching past. Years later, Coleman Stevenson dreams over breakfasts, diary arrays. It is Indiana, most likely, sometimes winter, middletown wanting to be more, dreaming of gardens, Cole Porter playing in the background, the implements individual, clattering in collision, springtime bursting forth in some kind of dream. Here they are, the days, from the desiccated Xmas tree, family as brushing teeth over the sink, to the glass globe of an anticipated green season. Go to your room for a timeout. Coleman Stevenson we love you get up and come to breakfast.

— Douglas Spangle, author, A White Concrete Day