The peculiar speakers of NO. WAIT. I CAN EXPLAIN. take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms in order to offer quirky insights and unexpected moments of wisdom about the vagaries of contemporary American life.

The poems and microfiction of NO. WAIT. I CAN EXPLAIN. are predominately surreal and playful. Many are unified by the quirky voices of hardscrabble speakers who have experienced social and economic turmoil, and a resulting psychic instability. Via interior monologues and uncanny dialogues, speakers take liberties with standard colloquial speech, invent unusual similes, and employ unconventional variants of American idioms. They also offer startling insights and unexpected moments of wisdom. Both in spite of, and because of, speakers' peculiarities, the poems and microfiction of NO. WAIT. I CAN EXPLAIN. seek to offer keen, if unsettling, glimpses into the darker--and often darkly humorous-- underlying dimensions of contemporary American life.

NO. WAIT. I CAN EXPLAIN. is a wonderful mixture of prose poems and micros that will pop into your mouth like bon bons which then explode into tiny, but potent, volcanoes. Each piece is filled with truth and wit and brilliant thought. A master of the prose poem, Brad Rose delights and challenges the reader in one swoop, asking questions like 'how far back does the past go? Why do we get only one life wedged in between two eternities?' He makes connections and observations about life and weaves them all into the tiny moments of flight that are the hallmark of prose poetry and micros. This is one collection you will not only read, but re-read, and re-read, and find another nugget of truth and wit and sheer delight every single time. --Francine Witte, author of Dressed All Wrong for This and The Way of the Wind

This delicious book of prose poems hooked me from the start. Beyond clever, Rose has an unrelenting quirkiness that makes it impossible to put this book down. 'The ocean is on death row, the continents burn like pyromaniacal Boy Scouts, and almost anything might happen, next, ' Rose declares in 'Climate Change.' How very right he is. -- Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Erotic

About Brad Rose I would say: I don't know where he's coming from--but the trains don't run there anymore. Truly the highest compliment I could ever pay to a poet. His leaps of imagery--from planet-to-planet--are sidesplitting. Then instantly turn to excavate the deepest spaces of human pathos. NO. WAIT. I CAN EXPLAIN. is a curio cabinet of creative genius. Acres of poems here by one of the most distinctive voices in all of creative writing. This guy can write. --Robert Nazarene, founding editor, The American Journal of Poetry

Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid.