R. Bremner’s You Who Are the Stranger :
A Decade of Restless Vision
There are poets whose words arrive like carefully folded letters — sealed, deliberate, and intended for a specific audience. And then there are poets like R. Bremner, whose words pour out across years, permeating the open air of life, music, politics, and love. His newly released volume, You Who Are the Stranger: Collected Poems 1979-1989, gathers a decade of his early work — poems once scattered across publications — now brought together here at Westbrae Literary Group.
The Decade That Formed a Voice
The poems in You Who Are the Stranger trace an arc from the late-70s counterculture through the dawn of the digital age — a time when the poet worked as a cab driver, security guard, and later as a computer programmer. Those experiences flicker through these pages: bus rides into Paterson, late-night diners, office corridors, and philosophical moments in the half-light of American cities. Bremner’s work belongs to a lineage of poets who wrote from the middle of life — not from the margins, but from its moving parts.
The Stranger Within and Without
The title comes from a line by Leonard Cohen — “It’s you, my love, you who are the stranger.” That invocation feels apt for Bremner’s world, where love and estrangement coexist. His poems step through thresholds: fathers and sons, lovers and ghosts, commuters and philosophers. “If only my father hadn’t been so damn responsible,” he writes, in one of the book’s most striking meditations on inheritance and restraint. Bremner’s speaker is both grateful and restless, seeking freedom from the very structures that made him safe.
On Craft and Irony
A hallmark of Bremner’s style is the way he can move from humor to heartbreak within a few lines. In “Stopping by Whores on a Crowded Street,” he reimagines Frost’s quiet New England as a cabbie’s Manhattan, trading snow for streetlights and “promises to keep” for fares to earn. Elsewhere, in “In Paterson, at Blimpies,” he sets Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, and Holden Caulfield in a greasy-spoon tableau — a scene as absurd as it is revealing of the mind’s need to keep talking through the noise.
Why It Matters Now
In our moment of speed and surface, You Who Are the Stranger reminds us of poetry’s endurance — the long patience of words written across a working life. Bremner’s poems are alive with human contradiction: tenderness and satire, idealism and fatigue, the urge to laugh even at what hurts. His voice joins a chorus of American realists — those who saw the beauty in broken neon and the truth in late-night buses.
About the Author
R. Bremner has published with small and “outlaw” presses including Cajun Mutt Press and Alien Buddha Press. He has won multiple Honorable Mentions in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. He lives in Northeast New Jersey with his wife, son, and their dog Ariel. You can follow him on Instagram at @beat_poet1.
You Who Are the Stranger: Collected Poems 1979-1989 is available now from
Westbrae Literary Group, Berkeley, California (ISBN 979-8-9917199-5-7).
