THE UNIVERSE THINKS ABOUT ANGER MANAGEMENT

“In Jake Bauer’s The Universe Thinks about Anger Management, the universe thinks about anger management, time is a lunch box, and small piranhas become big piranhas over time. Bauer’s surreal, daring, whimsical collection offers us a delightful exploration of language and sense making. It surprises us at every turn with brilliant line breaks, syntactic reversals and truly unexpected images. It made me think about things I had never thought before and see small moments and the world around me anew. With its tiny sunglasses, tiny crowns and mirrors, this book delighted me and stretched my brain.”

—Ananda Lima

“The poems in Jake Bauer’s The Universe Thinks about Anger Management look like tall thin trees, and he’s standing atop this grove and he’s reporting—what is he reporting on? I might say “the absurdity of objects and man’s limited view”?—yet somehow this reporting of absurdity and narrowness opens me up, the poems invite my brain to... an Immensity Party. Or put another way, if our disease right now is dross (thank you, AI), then these precise and toy-rapier-like poems are antiserums for our neurons—what I most appreciate from this book is how careful Bauer is to not trace the same familiar neural pathways—his logic and his language always veer off from the expected, and this attention and care make his poetry, his weird, awesome, cartoon-world poetry. I would follow his non sequiturs anywhere.”

—Darcie Dennigan