Poetry that imagines how to live with realness, creativity, and vibrance. The poems in Clouds Upside Down Among the Flowers speak to the emotionally and existentially tough challenge presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy: “It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task.”Filled with wit, color, and high-spirited invention, these selected poems offer no room for softness and sentiment. They carry variant voices, whispers like dramatic asides, and mind-expanding assertions as they reveal their layers and nuances. Bedient confronts disasters of politics, love, and faithless time, never turning away from the glinting axe.   This collection also includes new poems that are direct in dealing with the difficulties of keeping faith through life. They recognize that making something—for instance, poetry—is necessary to coach the world into realness and render oneself real in the process, a journey of both intensive investigation and creativity.