Author of Ursula Lake and Sidebend World

Charles Harper Webb

Called “Southern California’s most inventive and accessible poet,” Charles Harper Webb is the nation’s foremost proponent of Stand Up Poetry. A former professional rock singer/guitarist and licensed psychotherapist, he is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His latest of twelve collections of poetry is Sidebend World( University of Pittsburgh, 2018). Webb has published a collection of essays, A Million MFAs Are Not Enough(Red Hen, 2016), and edited Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology(University of Iowa, 2002), used as a text in many universities. His awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Tufts Discovery Award, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. An avid fly-fisherman, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Ursula Lake

In the fast-paced, sexy, and very scary literary thriller Ursula Lake, a husband and wife trying to save their marriage and a rock musician trying to get his career back on track find big trouble, natural and possibly supernatural, in the spellbinding wilds of British Columbia.

Ursula Lake is a rare novel that is equal parts lyrical and suspenseful. Charles Harper Webb uses his poet’s voice to weave a haunting tale that marries the latent horrors of the natural world to the dark heart of the humans who inhabit it.

—Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

Nobody handles language like a poet. So whenever I see a novel written by a poet I admire, I know I'm in for a treat. Charles Harper Webb's Ursula Lake is scary, emotionally wrenching, sexy, tender, and full of natural beauty. It's also lively, fast-paced, and fun to read as it rips into the comforting lies that prop civilization up. In this novel, Webb shows why he's won so may writing awards. Take my advice, and plunge head-first into Ursula Lake.

—Ron Koertge, author of Yellow Moving Van

Sidebend World

With twelve full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has risen to the center stage of American poetry. Brain Camp—vintage Webb, with even greater depth and range than before— shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, and entertaining poets writing in the U.S.A. today, as well as one of the most profound.

Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best humor must, from serious human drives and needs. Powered by a fierce, compassionate intelligence, Brain Campexplores with clarity and vividness a wide spectrum of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality—all from a perspective both universal yet distinctly Webb’s. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a voice at once endearing and provocative, high musicality, propulsive energy, wild imaginative leaps, as well as mastery of diction from lyricism to street-speak, create a reading experience of the first order. These poems go down easy, but pack a wallop. As Robert Frost said poetry should do, Brain Camp "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."