What critics say: “Gerald Fleming’s The Bastard and the Bishop is an awakening. Socially incisive and psychologically illuminating, it presents us with a full range of human passion and emotion. You didn’t know prose could sing, poetry could mean? Read The Bastard and the Bishop and see for yourself.”
—Pablo Medina, Author of The Cuban Comedy
“Fleming, a master of the prose poem, is never satisfied to sing the same song, and this adventuresome spirit pays dividends in these new prose poems. Constantly surprising and inventive, he offers stories within stories that effortlessly merge the personal and the archetypal, breathing new life into a genre that has increasingly, and often sadly, become predictable.
—Peter Johnson, Author of Truths, Falsehoods, and a Wee Bit of Honesty: A Short Primer on the Prose Poem, with Selected Letters from Russell Edson
“The crystalline vignettes in The Bastard and the Bishop let us drop into many hinted-at histories and subconscious motives. Fleming built these prose poems and their fragmented realities using small, collected phrases from a book he was gifted; those bits of language set him off toward mesmerizing perspectives. … [The Bastard and the Bishop]is a book of curiosities is a wonderland, a new way to journey through human interactions.”
—Lauren Camp, Author of Took House
