These poems can make paint bubble and burn. Read them in broad daylight, to be on the safe side."

There is a passionate drive and hunger in these poems—"Slow down you wolves. I am lonely too!" These poems dance with the movement and depth of each moment of time lived, filled with histories, memories, and ghosts who must not be woken but which claw at the shadows of awareness."

In Jesus of Walmart, Richard Broderick explores the often shifting boundaries between human and animal, human and human, the self and the larger world, the macabre and the mythological, one side of the sky and the other—in the endless night to which the eyes refuse to adjust. We, the many, live and breathe in these poems, moving with deep humanity, with the wind and the snow and the river, with our daily grace."

There are poems in Jesus of Walmart with extraordinary respect for distance, both historical and emotional. There are poems full of great lyric singing. A portrait emerges, as the narrator turns out to the world, and history, turns toward love and memory, we see his discernment of self, his dreams, his books—we become intimate with what he loves about light and rain, we walk with him as he holds up the lantern to the darkness he sees, but we always hear the singing."