Description
Book SynopsisAward-winning poet Fleda Brown’s thirteenth book examines life and death through a timely, urgent collection of contemplative poems about damage, pain, and loss.
Trade Review“[This is] a hybrid book, a combination of poetry and prose. It proves that at high levels of composition there is little distinction between the two. A superb accomplishment.” -- Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at Stockton University
“It is easy to forget that only the rarest of people have something interesting to say about themselves. But Fleda Brown proves a mesmerizing exception—anything she cares to share is manna for our deepest needs.” * Foreword Reviews *
“Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language that you come away from her poems amazed at the emotional impact under the entertaining and colloquial surfaces.” -- Linda Pastan
“Cast in an impressive variety of forms, Brown manages her signature, magical metamorphoses, poetry skying at its best, yet, somehow, never leaving the ground it rises from.” -- Dabney Stuart
“To read these poems is to look through a newly washed window; the world is strangely bright and, at the same time, frighteningly familiar. This is a difficult effect to achieve—one that only succeeds when it is not an effect, but something effortless. In [Brown’s] hands, effort is invisible.” * in the Georgia Review (Fall 1994) *
Table of ContentsI. Not Dying
Come Moths
Wakened by Crows
It Isn’t That You Forget Things
Museum
Milkweed
Glasses
Nothing Comes Together to Mean What I Meant
Afternoons at the Lake
Not Dying
Dear Pablo Picasso
Ode on Terror
Sing
II. Treatises
Treatises
III. Old Woman in Swimsuit
Old Woman in Swimsuit
Brief
The Art of Composition
Sea Otters
A Poem for Objects in My House
Ode on Sadness
Ode on Bees
Dear Frida Kahlo
The Goldilocks Zone
Wounded Dog
Peaceable Kingdom
Stalking the Wild
IV. Twenty Letters in Spring
Twenty Letters in Spring
V. Damage
Damage
Joy
Letter from Battle Creek
Love Song Including Moon
Flying through a Hole in the Storm
Floater
Dear Grandma Moses
Atmospheric Optics
Confession
Enjoy
Resting in the Arms
Running with Knives
History Is Not a Great Tree
Weeping Alaskan Cedar
Acknowledgments
Notes
