Pudding House,1999
ISBN: 0-944754-74-0
38 pages
$6.00

First Edition 300 copies, Fall 1999
5 3/8 by 8 1/2, saddle stapled, white pages, has transparent front and end paper followed by one leaf of brown paper.

Second Edition ? copies.
5 3/8 by 8 1/2, saddle stapled, white pages, no transparent paper, all of the pages are white, cover is sometimes brown instead of  the original dark brown/ blood red 80 lb paper.

These sonnets that are not sonnets would shock a world that denies the poetic, unless in a usual sense, ivory tower, elephants' graveyard, flowery bower. This is not that. I had a dream about this sequence of thirty, where a lovely and huge egg had to be raised from the ocean ---choppy---there was no way without cracking its shell...there were many fragments. It has taken me, along with this book, to heart. Today's philosophy crushes yesterday's like a fortune cookie. "I love the idea. The blind date of our lives/ where we each hide the person we should be." A formula for trouble, of which we witnesses are
victim, it made us. This blurb is only just. Because we _are_ the Fall of Because. 
---David Bromige.

These "compartments" perspire clarity, driving the familiar to the locus of legend, repeatedly prompting re-observation of daily life, and toying with the parodic within newly minted folk tunes of the specific.      --- Sheila E. Murphy
 

David Baratier's The Fall of Because resonates with whimsy and mystery. The poems accumulate line by line with a beautiful strangeness, as if someone's shaken up his snowglobe, but it's flower pedals falling instead-- fragrant, fragile, wonderous. He's got a great off-beat comic touch, but he's tough too, in all the ways that matter. He's a true
original who'll spin your head around. ---Jim Daniels

David Baratier's poems have a unique freshness of image and syntax which continually surprises and delights the reader with its playfulness. We have to stay alert for each word, each phrase, each line, for new perspectives surface for a split second and then as quickly disappear. Reading these poems is like being fully awake to the possibilities of language, its shifts and turns, its depths and surface glitters-- a unique and rewarding experience!
                                                  -- Len Roberts

Tid-bit:
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              Ed Kopta sets the stereo on fire

              There once was a fire who went beyond
              his means and then was declared bankrupt
              in the court which judged him. My friend Josh
              once fought fires to save the extinct animals
              themselves but not the concept. There are
              those lost in well treed forests with no
              intention of leaving. They have left
              their day jobs and are quite happily unrecorded.
              But mostly when I think of fire, I think of
              Ed watching the candle samba to the speaker's
              backbeat. And how the woofer moved to
              the candle's light flicker and, at that moment,
              well versed in chemicalogical underpinnings,
              how Edward knew to unite the ununiteable.

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More tender vittles at:

http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket07/index07.html

http://www.burningpress.org/va/pote/potez08.html

Poems first appeared in: Blank Gun Silencer, Denver Quarterly,
P O T E P O E T Z I N E, Fourteen Hills, Jacket, Poetry Motel,
Poet Lore, Red Brick Review, Slipstream. And in the out of print:
Palmed Compartments: Rush 2 Press (Philly)
Compartments (a short run): Boog Literature (NYC)