Welcome to Hollie Street. Pull up a chair in the kitchen and dip into this new collection of poems by Athens poet Mark Bromberg. His voice is that of your favorite uncle sipping gin and weaving tales. It meanders through a gentle life on the cusp of a certain age. The poems are by turns playful, whimsical, incisive, but always self-aware. The collection is real as January flu or unwashed dishes soaking in the sink. It is magical as a mockingbird improvising on Vivaldi. It is serious as sidewalk dharma, yet mellow as the poet himself greeting a frazzled neighbor as her black lab steals Meow Mix from his porch. Relax. Life brings storms and lost power, but joy, joy and beauty await. -- Bob Ambrose, author of Journey to Embarkation

Though mountains of information can be beckoned at a whim, it can be hard to sift through today's word glut for something real and true. In Mark Bromberg's One Day the Birds Will Explain Everything, a reader can find a wealth of real time moments on a creaturely scale, even as the writer describes a cosmic view. Bromberg can see the "joy joy beauty" in ordinary life, while packing aphoristic humor and wisdom into his palm-sized, formally inventive poems. Eschew all "content" and listen to this poet (and the birds) for best news. -- Michelle Castleberry, author of Dissecting the Angel and Other Poems

Good poets make good company, and Bromberg’s poems are invitations to that endless conversation we have only with our closest, oldest friends. Wry observations slipped into the daily churn are here; deftly turned asides that rope in Classical Greece and the internet set up camp together in the human commons; sharp memories of other days and other hearts enrich the news; a mind let loose to follow a path both unique and universal takes us along, and tales of porch cats bump against American folly. Pull up a chair and join the conversation. -- Penny Noah, author of Masked / Unmasked

MARK BROMBERG is a poet, publisher, and editor living in Athens GA. His 2022 poetry collection Straw Hat Stanzas (Parson's Porch Books) was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year (poetry) by the Georgia Writers Association. He is the editor of Interbeing: New and Selected Poems About Ecological Spirituality by Eugene C. Bianchi (Wipf & Stock publishers, Eugene OR). His own work has appeared online in Levi Asher's Literary Kicks (NYC), Michael Rothenberg's Big Bridge online magazine, and a selection of his poems is in the 10th anniversary issue of Mary Sands Woodbury's Jack magazine (San Francisco). His nonfiction piece "Brother, can you paradigm?" was published online in Drunken Boat #11. His poetry has been read on American Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion. He is currently the manager of Athens Word of Mouth monthly open mic event, and his book imprint, Bellemeade Books, released the group anthology in 2015.