What the Night Numbered

Tice, Bradford

*SIGNED COPY*

“Brad Tice’s What the Night Numbered is a vibrant fresco of a book, portraying the painful and gorgeous stories of Gay Liberation with consummate skill. Tice proves once and for all that formal mastery and sympathetic openness are not opposites, but mutually entailing—twin sources of any art that would respond to the call of necessity. And this is indeed a necessary book. In “Psyche’s Third Trial,” one of Tice’s speakers claims, while writing a letter to his lover:

I have this hope

that if I fold the pages tight enough, the pulp

could become a seed. A pit that could

take route in the dirt of those cracks, send out roots,

break apart these streets

“These muscular, subtle lines make a fine description of Tice’s own superb poems.”

-Peter Campion, Trio Award Judge, author of El Dorado

“Merging the myth of Cupid and Psyche with the events of the 1969 Stonewall Riots that jump-started the gay and lesbian civil rights movement, What the Night Numbered is a masterful collection. In this coming-of-age sequence where sex serves as a pathway to both death and rebirth, Psyche meets others who have hidden their true selves and those who are now ready to emerge into the great anonymity of New York. Tice offers a multiplicity of voices to showcase what the merging of poetry and history can achieve. These poems whisper to one another, pull at each other’s hands, and ultimately create their own world within the borders of the written page. A brilliant book.”

-Charlotte Pence, author of Many Small Fires

“Myth is history in drag,” Bradford Tice reminds us in What the Night Numbered, a seamless novella-in-poems that recasts the Stonewall era as Greek mythology. With the bawdiness of Chaucer and the commitment to character of Browning, Tice conducts an uncanny pageant of empathetic and vividly imagined monologues, each speaker transfigured like the breathing of someone hidden / who wants to be found.”

-James Shea, author of The Lost Novel