With eleven full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has gained national recognition as a writer of poems that are complex yet reader-friendly. Sidebend World shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, and psychologically astute poets writing in the U.S.A. today, as well as one of the most entertaining.    

Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best humor must, from serious concerns. Powered by an uncompromising but compassionate intelligence and an abiding wonder at the beautiful strangeness of the world, Sidebend World explores with clarity and vividness a wide range of emotions—love to hate, tenderness to brutality; yet, above all, Webb is a poet of praise. Metaphors of startling aptness and originality, a distinctive voice at once provocative and endearing, 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, Sidebend World "begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

Charles Harper Webb has published twelve books of poetry, including Brain Camp. Webb’s awards in poetry include the Morse Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Felix Pollock Prize, and the Benjamin Saltman Prize. Webb is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.

"His unique sidebend slant finds both the humor in the absurdity of our daily lives, and the heart that sustains us through that absurdity. The genius of Webb's poetry is the flurry of synapses that go off on every page—it's pure joy to read his work, to try to keep up with him." —Jim Daniels

"Like the work in his wonderful anthology, Stand Up Poetry, Charles Harper Webb’s glorious new collection, Sidebend World, features poems that indeed do ‘stand up,’ providing a welcome comedy and stability at a time when the only heroes may be sandwiches, when fathers dread a future of clowndom in their young son’s eyes, when fear and fatigue are our constant companions. Equal parts wisdom and whimsy, Webb’s ‘stand up’ poems are constantly doing side bends that tilt the cosmos dangerously, exhilaratingly, off-kilter, then—lovingly, affirmatively—set the world right again." —Ronald Wallace