Brain Camp

Charles Harper Webb is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Reading the Water, Liver, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Hot Popsicles, Amplified Dog, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, and What Things Are Made Of. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize, and Poets of the New Century. Webb has received the Morse Prize, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Pollak Prize, and Saltman Prize, the Whiting Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship, among other awards. He is professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing program there.

Webb writes with vinegar and honey. We're made to feel part of a coterie of inside jokes and clever references, and Webb is a welcoming guide into his world of sardonic asides and awed tributes. The voice in these poems is both dark and light, droll but touching, caustic yet nostalgic, wryly winking and nodding while clearly embracing the absurd."" - The Los Angeles Review""[Webb is] a real wisecracker whose poems shimmer with wit. He’s full of an exuberant whimsy, his brain on steroids, often wise, and nothing if not entertaining. Brain Camp certainly offers a welcome vacation for anybody looking to be intellectually amused by a guy with a gift for making fun of things."" - Concho River Review