Entering his 30’s, our nameless narrator longs for the time to pursue his passion while struggling to endure the rut of work, eat, sleep on repeat. If he can hold out for just a little longer, he’ll have his debt cleared. Then he can focus on his art.
His dreary routine is broken, however, when his dog attacks a neighbor’s chicken. That’s when things get weird. Things come: a stone with an immeasurable but intermittent weight, a glass shard that’s oddly warm to the touch. Things go: short-term memory, long-term live-in girlfriend, his grip on reality. And things keep coming, and things keep going. Things keep changing. And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
Blink, Blip, Bloom (2022)
In surreal, lyrical style, PCB explores loss, grief, temporality, ambition, love and beauty via passages through a blinking or possibly absent moon (which is really an ear), a stone with an immeasurable but intermittent weight, a crimson shard that’s oddly warm to the touch, a stunned (or possibly murdered) chicken, and a sleep talking long-term live-in girlfriend.
Patrick Crawford Bryant is an independent author. His first novel, Hum A Radiant Sickness, was published in 2017. In 2010, Patrick received the Pocataligo prize for poetry. His work has been featured by Kakalak, Yemassee Journal and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative among other publications. He currently works as a digital marketer. In his free time, he enjoys rock climbing, reading, gaming, and playing guitar.
"Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Bryant's voice is how effortlessly he shifts between the ranting, zen-wise nihilist and the gently lyrical poet, the devil on your shoulder, ironizing anything and everything, and the occasionally earnest narrator."
"There's a heart at the center of it all (heavy, bleeding, and larded as it is), and when the book turns inward long enough to check if it's still beating, the results are wonderfully strange and beautiful."
"The feverish surrealism here is quite a ride. There isn't a lot of this heady stuff out there that retains coherency without falling back into magic realism. I appreciate pushing the line into surrealism as long as it stays intelligible, which the author does perfectly."
"With compelling lyricism, Hum A Radiant Sickness takes the reader on a surreal romp through the subconscious of a young man teetering on the ledge between a terrifying but hallowed self-actualization and the begrudging contentedness of an imposed conformity."
