My poems are playful, meditative and sensuous. The books of poems I have published thus far I think of as my Green Party sequence: affiliation with the Green Party and, more importantly, its political vision — planetary and communitarian — is stated, at times, and, more often, imaginatively explored and meditated upon in each of the books. I wrote them to survive our common darkness and to share the joy and the risks of insight.

Reviews:

“Translucid, while hiding from the world behind himself, Brian Glaser sings and cries and sings once again, teaching us how to go through the journey of our existence. This collection of poetry is pure art. It shows us the playful and very serious path to the creation of real beauty.”  –Alicia Kozameh on All the Hills

“Contradictions invites us to take part in a sensuous journey of discovery. Precise observations of the ordinary lead us into thoughtful meditations on art, religion, nature, joy, justice, violence, and ‘the human project of morality.’ The ease with which this book connects the keen experience of physical reality with the diversity of philosophical issues is awe-inspiring. One can only congratulate Brian Glaser on his achievement of keeping ‘the embers of the sacred flame of poetry alive.'” — Georg Schiller

“Brian Glaser uses poetic technique, intellectual material, memory, and emotion in unexpected and moving originality. Like a good teacher, the poems come right at the reader with bald questions and make the reader struggle with them. The reader doesn’t feel alone though. The quest for ‘inventive solutions to intractable questions’ is shared painfully, humorously, and with great tenderness. We are left with a wry wisdom and raw elements, in a space between all thought, where the real activity occurs silently.” –Beth Jacobs on Contradictions

“Brian Glaser is a spiritual seeker, which involves continually testing wisdom from several spiritual traditions. But the major emphasis is on an effort to produce as absolute a clarity as possible about elemental features of his life–natural, personal, familial, social, and political. Innocence becomes as fundamental as air; desire as fundamental as water. So poetry itself has to renounce metaphor and elaborate form in order to hew as closely as possible to honest renderings of surprising moments when the shadows lift and the mind responds to something worth enduring. These moments seem utterly bare. The poetry resides in the resonance of what comes to matter as it just comes into language, often weaving sites of contradiction that also serve as means of recognizing how intractably solitude, social pressure, and familial ties serve to foster one another. Poetry becomes a process of imagination ceaselessly adjusting to shifts in possibilities of responsiveness. And the moral life becomes inseparable from fostering careful attention to what creates and binds our passions.” –Charles Altieri on Contradictions

“In Difficult Joy, difficulty means both suffering and labor; and joy, a pleasure in both language and the world. In one poem, a mapless angel searches for home, offering an apt metaphor for the entire collection. Brian Glaser forges new pathways through the dark linguistic wood to home in on the complexity, horror, and, yes, joy of the world.” –Jacob Edmond

“Brian Glaser’s Höldlerlin is perhaps the most beautifully rhythmed version of this long piece to date.” —Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation

“. . . evokes things like Frost and Whitman, seeing something haunting in nature, but probably more like Frost because the human element is so present and nostalgic, the way the poet seems to recognize the detachment from nature and feel a bit sad about it, missing something, and yet in a way that makes for a lonely sort of beauty.” —Quick Sip Reviews