What is a spell?In As Blood Is the Fruit of the Heart: A Book of Spells, this question conjures many answers. Ultimately it's this: A spell is that most ancient tool of poets and storytellers using crafted language powered by breath and clear focus, sent forth as a messenger into the cosmos. As Mary Ruefle has said, "The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it." Some of the poems in this book foretell, some protect; some condemn, some praise.Always they spring from this central belief: there is no power like the power of the word.

Bradley's spells amuse and admonish us in quirky and surprising ways. His long lines wind thru strange spaces and take us along for the ride. Some spells are dark and some quite funny, taken all together they are a view into the surreal world of incantation, long the province of poets.