ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bryan D. Dietrich lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife Gina and their son, Nick. Professor of English at Newman University, Bryan has won the Paris Review Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, the Isotope Editors’ Prize, and the Eve of St. Agnes Award.

A five-time finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Bryan has been nominated for both the Pushcart and the Pulitzer. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Harvard Review, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other journals.

His first book, Krypton Nights, was published in 2002. His second, Universal Monsters, is now available from Word Press. Bryan grew up watching classic horror movies and dreaming of becoming a comic book artist. He remains conflicted about choosing a tenure-track job over a chance to be an extra in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks, but is comforted by the fact that the first person to be abducted in Aliens is named Dietrich.

ABOUT THE NEW BOOK:

Universal Monsters, Dietrich's newest book, is much more personal than his first, the award-winning Krypton Nights. From boudoir to abattoir, from desire to dissolution to divorce, from The Bride of Frankenstein to Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, this is a book that engages monsters, yes, but also the everyday human traumas that rend.

Universal Monsters is published by Word Press and is now available.  Please go to:

amazon.com or www.word-press.com.

NOTE: A few copies of Krypton Nights are still available through Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas: www.eighthdaybooks.com.

EARLY WORD ON UNIVERSAL MONSTERS:

 “No one writing today is as adept at twining popular and high cultures, or as skilled at shifting—mid-line—from colloquial to grand style. With characteristic wit, humor, and astonishing craft, Bryan Dietrich has provided yet another volume in which what is human becomes all the more visible via fantastic avatar.”

—Scott Cairns, author of Recovered Body   

“In this most serious and compelling monster book, Dietrich uses films and legends—from Frankenstein to It Came from Outer Space, from the Yeti to Sasquach, from Loch Ness to Skull Island—to show us that the monster is primarily a metaphor for what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Cursed and blessed with its sense of alienation and desire, it longs simultaneously for the hearth and for the outlands, for the pure and for the perverse, for life and for oblivion. Thus the heart also becomes its own haunted house, as can its correlate, the family. ‘Too bad real life doesn’t come with danger music,’ the speaker in ‘B Movie’ observes. But the hauntings here are real, and the danger music bone-deep and beautiful.”

—William Trowbridge, author of the Complete Book of Kong

“Bryan Dietrich’s astonishing new collection Universal Monsters clearly establishes him as one of the most imaginatively resourceful and mercurial young poets writing today, a voice capable of dressing down the extremities of horror, of rendering it more approachable, intimate, funny at times, and yet for all its ironies something to own, embodying a whole range of feeling characteristically denied the gothic. And what a monstrous universe he inhabits. Everywhere we look in these poems, we see a voracious intelligence, replete, curious, quick, generous with its attentions, yet boldly reinventing the traditions it honors, sustaining its engagements with a lust for the sumptuous phrase, formal pleasure, and unlikely detail, unnerving, perhaps, but likewise charged with a certain reverie. This reverie is the other face of generosity. Here the play of the mind is so alive, the book’s dark has a kind of shine.”

— Bruce Bond, author of The Throats of Narcissus

“The craft of Bryan Dietrich’s Universal Monsters is impeccable—dense, elegant lines polished free of any excess. Yet the sensibility shaping those lines owes more to Ed Wood than Wordsworth. Though its tropes come from B-movies and other escapist fictions, Universal Monsters isn’t about getting out, it’s about getting in. Into the intimacies of family and identity, into the mysteries that baffle us and defy explanation, into the endless wonder of physical existence. Universal Monsters is not for the faint of heart.”

—Marta Ferguson, former poetry editor for The Missouri Review

“There’s a remarkable scene in the classic Frankenstein film, where Karloff’s creature gently hands a little girl a flower. This book is like that flower: a gift that reminds us of the humanity of monstrosity (as well as the universal monstrosity of humanity). Dietrich is a virtuoso of shape and structure, plumbing the profound depths of this metaphor. I can think of no other writer who bridges lyrical forms with genre material so artfully, wringing significance out of the neck of every word. Universal Monsters is an amazing accomplishment.”

—Mike Arnzen, winner of the Bram Stoker Award

 PRAISE FOR KRYPTON NIGHTS:

“Bryan Dietrich’s Krypton Nights, a book-length suite of poems...won The Paris Review’s poetry prize in 2001, with no less an arbiter than Richard Howard calling it ‘a remarkable conribution to American Literature.’”

—Harper’s

“Krypton Nights is a surprising pleasure, full of verbal high jinks, wit, depth and flamboyance.”

—The Chicago Tribune

“Like the four-color revolution of Frank Miller or the randy speculations of Larry Niven on the same subject, Dietrich’s poems prove that pop mythology flows surprisingly deep.”

—Asimov’s Science Fiction

“Dietrich...brings gracefully together the high culture of myth and the low culture of the adolescent comic book world, proving the two aren’t so far apart…. The book’s last poem...is at once a tour-de-force of poetry and scriptural exegesis.”

—The Missouri Review

“In the end, the S, which according to Clark was not even a letter originally, becomes a variable cryptogram, not only for Superman, but for all the myths, social, political, and religious, that are built on the concept of the super being—from Nazi to savior.... Like the best prose science fiction, this book examines the paradoxes that haunt the human race, and opens doors to greater mysteries.”

—New York Review of Science Fiction

“In Krypton Nights, Bryan D. Dietrich doesn’t merely allude to popular culture; he wears it like a mask, and he uses this assumed identity to plunge into deeper meditations on what is mythic and what is religious.... Amazingly, Dietrich achieves this while staying 100% true to voices he borrows. Krypton Nights suggests a life time of reading and learning.”

—Main Street Rag

“What Dietrich does with [Jor-El and Lex Luthor] is glittering and grievous and altogether unnerving: the authority of their monologues is absolute.... Krypton Nights is precisely one-half majesty.”

—The Constant Critic

“Bryan Dietrich’s dazzling Krypton Nights…uses rhyme and rhythm to tell us more about Superman and Lois Lane and Lex Luthor than Smallville ever will.”

—The Independent

“...Dietrich examines Superman from a variety of perspectives, leaving the reader with a clearer vision of who Superman isn’t and his differences from us and Christ.”

—Small Press Review

“One rarely finds a collection by any but the most famous poets that does not hold fast to some organizing conceit…. I think of Glück’s The Wild Iris, Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell, Dietrich’s Krypton Nights as three stirring examples.”

—Small Press Review

“Against the backdrop of the heroic writ large, Dietrich counterpoints the all too common stuff of our human frailty and failure to successfully negotiate the personal and fashion a reasonable compromise with reality. Dietrich reminds us that great poems are ultimately great arguments with ourselves.”

—Society of the Muse of the Southwest

“Frequently blasphemous and always thought provoking, Krypton Nights is the kind of book Superman deserved to have written about him; it definitively elevates his fictional status to one of a much greater (and as of yet unexplored) importance.”

—Amazon.com

“And I don’t want to forget to mention Krypton Nights, a superb and very moving collection of poems about Superman and Lois and Lex (and Jor-el) written by Bryan D. Dietrich.… The courage, sympathy and wit Dietrich displayed in imagining fresh (but legitimate) personas for the whole Superman cast inspired me to take some risks myself with those (daunting) characters.”

—Tom DeHaven, author of It’s Superman