I Love Information

“The ecstatic second volume from Bush wrestles with what a poem can do. […] The playfulness of these poems manifests as a seeking, associative voice roaming through the details it encounters […] Though thoroughly contemporary, the poems move assuredly and timelessly in their nonlinear fashion, demonstrating how language travels through and between events. Bush makes addenda and corrections […] These provocative and experimental poems delight.”

“In Bush’s comfortably disjointed poems, surprise and pleasure are nearly constant, each line its own song. She saves profluence for clever pairings [… .} Bush writes at the convergence of modernity and mysticism, turning her poems inside out”

“A paradise of non sequiturs, I Love Information might contain ‘poems forked as a devil road,’ but each one proves a jump cut’s the quickest way to a ‘kind of heaven of facts without context, clean sources of light.’ A seeker who settles for nothing less than maximum amplitude, Courtney Bush heads ever toward ‘things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining,’ her poems a means to ‘entering sacred time recklessly,’ now with the gusto and bumptious charm of Christopher Smart, now with the sibylline intelligence of Rilke, and always with the antic candor of a digital native. Information at root means to give form to, and I too love the way these exciting, excitable poems give new form to the world I think I know by revealing the plurality of worlds quickly spinning within it.”

“I Love Information by Courtney Bush renders the bent and bendable logics of friendship, work, art, and love with startling wit and depth of feeling. I love the unpredictable angles of arrival Bush’s poems make shapes with, and the concise quality of their visual acuity. These poems include, adopt, memorialize, and let spread an expansive populace of voices and beings—they are totally open, and that openness establishes their ground. This is an amazing book.”

“‘I do not want to be crazy / about the circle whose center is everywhere.’ So begins Courtney Bush’s I Love Information, a book of revelation—and of risk. Here is a poet who has entered the crucible of madness in her pursuit of ‘some internal logic strong enough to believe in’ and come back to tell us about the songs the angels sing in ‘the space between everything.’ Touching down in preschool classrooms in which the poet has taught, the Mississippi Gulf Coast of her childhood, and intimate vignettes of love and friendship along the way, these oracular, incantatory poems prove the world worthy of the quest.”

“In extreme cases, imagination is an affliction, or did we mean addiction? Please stop, says the poet, let’s pause here. But that seems not an option for Courtney Bush [in I Love Information] .”