Bruce Colbert Books

PAINT ME MIDNIGHT BLUE When New York City abstract artist Johnny Howard bought a vacation home in the sleepy village of Woodstock to escape the turmoil of the contemporary art world, his life changed forever, and not by what people could see. Visited by the ghostly spirit of a teenage girl who disappeared from the old boarded-up Broadway dance school he now calls home, he embarks on a perilous journey to avenge her brutal killing of eight years earlier, turning his own life upside down, never to be the same. An exciting look at the world outside our minds and within our hearts... "Who was this Lizzie Connelly who snipped locks of her raven hair, and put it in this dance book? Why? Did she have one of those short haircuts girls sometimes get after wearing her hair shoulder length for years? I looked around the spacious half empty living room which had been used for the rehearsals. I could almost hear the girls dance those staccato footsteps, and the dance mistress calling out the movement changes. I flipped through the dance book for a minute. I thought about how this had belonged to one of those dancers who was determined to make it big on Broadway, so full of ambition and talent, bubbling with infectious excitement. They believed the world was theirs for the taking. It made me smile to think about that."

Canary in the Dark is a glance backward into a past of pain and raucous joy too, with that leveling certainty of both distance and knowing. This exuberant new collection of memoir poems offers few definitive answers or epiphanies. In its measured lyrical wake, the reader finds that at the end this awful darkness we seek to escape really holds little fear.This ever familiar coal-mining town and its people of once memory, that defining part of a life….and longing.“Bruce Colbert's poems anatomize a lifelong quest to resolve the The legacy of an emotionally abusive parent. The voice is vernacular, garrulous, and steady, and the landscape of the Appalachian coal belt becomes the treacherous terrain of memory in which the speaker is the bellwether of the title.”- Amy Glynn, author of A Modern Herbal“Canary in the Dark captures a landscape of a time and place, of family and faith. A landscape of loss and unwanted change. These poems bring colour to their oblivion and tell truths.”- Christopher Hopkins, author of The Last Time We Saw Strangers“A staggering memoir written in reflective prose… that out of the purest joy sometimes comes an awful pain. Stories from a coal mining town boyhood to love to war.”- Jeffery Paul Horn, author of Manic