Christopher Bernard Reads from Chien Lunatique

Love, Modernity, and the Internet Just who, or what, is le chien lunatique?

The poet driven out of his mind when faced with the catastrophe of the modern world? The modern world turned into a rabid canine when faced with the hopelessly idealistic poet? Or when it looks in the mirror and sees what it has become?

These poems – profound yet accessible, contemporary yet classical, eloquent and dynamic even when apparently most despairing – distill one poet’s somewhat jaundiced look at modernity, from the Renaissance and the philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century to the nihilism of postmodernism, from the death of God to the bankruptcy of humanism, from the midnight of the Enlightenment to the immortalized barbarism of the internet. Yet behind all of these poems, supporting them like a hand, lies the passion that drives all of existence, old or new – the ferocious and uncompromising demands of love.

A rabid dog eventually bites itself to death. So is there hope pour ce pauvre chien lunatique? Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t. Only the future knows. It sits at your feet. Growling.

Pre-publication Comments on
Christopher Bernard’s
CHIEN LUNATIQUE

“An extraordinary, and extraordinarily strange, accomplishment. It is bound to offend at least one of your friends.”
– Jack Foley

“. . . poems of diamond-like brilliance, filled with despair, passion, and surreal beauty. The poet . . . in an act of intellectual courage, climbs up on the rubble of western culture to speak truth to both power and powerlessness.”
– Mary Mackey, author of Sugar Zone and
the novel The Village of Bones

“Another entrancing book from a poet and novelist of visionary authority, whose imagination is at once brilliant and unsettling.”
– Ernest Hilbert, author of Caligulan

“An attempt to right the world . . . a generous collection.” – Simon Perchik

“ ‘The Wife of the Painter’ . . . takes my breath away . . . . ‘Midnight’ is . . . a masterpiece, yet so modest as to almost escape notice.”
– Curt Barnes

“In this provocative collection of poems, Christopher Bernard emerges as a maverick bucking current tastes and trends . . . balancing an unabashed prophetic fury with poems of great love and tenderness.”
– Philip Fried