You Who Are the Stranger - Collected Poems 1979-1989

In You Who Are the Stranger, R. Bremner gathers a decade of poems that wander city streets, back rooms, dreams, and memories with an unflinching eye and a restless heart. Here are poems that drift like smoke rings and strike like thunderclaps, moving from cab rides through Paterson to late-night reckonings with fathers, lovers, and ghosts. Bremner's voice-by turns raw, tender, irreverent, and luminous-captures the grit of sidewalks, the ache of longing, and the absurdities of living. His poems wrestle with responsibility and rebellion, the weight of history, and the fleeting, fragile brilliance of art. From intimate portraits to surreal vignettes, these works testify to a life both ordinary and extraordinary, where every bus ride, back alley, and broken mirror becomes a stage for meaning. For readers of Leonard Cohen, Allen Ginsberg, and anyone who has ever felt both stranger and intimate in the same breath, Bremner's collection offers a rare, candid music of the soul.