Bad Is Bent Good by Dave Mehler is a deeply immersive, poetic exploration of life working at a landfill in Portland, Oregon. The poems are a dynamic mixture of prose poetry, haiku, sonnets, and lyric that draw readers into the gritty, suffocating environment of the dump, portraying its workers, customers, and some of the animal inhabitants. With meticulous detail and empathy, Mehler captures the harshness of the landfill workers' lives, their resilience, and their profound humanity, portraying the characters in a raw, real way without romanticizing their struggles. While the landfill is a real place populated by garbage and the marginalized, it also becomes an abstract landscape the poet uses to explore the philosophical and metaphysical. Most of all, the landfill is a vibrant chiaroscuro-a place of despair and darkness in which the poet delves to illuminate pockets of beauty and light-making it a pertinent metaphor for the contradictions inherent in not only the human condition, but stretching figuratively even to the outer reaches of the universe.
