By Fleda Brown
“[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
A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse.
Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation.
Brown’s poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to life’s terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.
Fleda Brown has won the Felix Pollak Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and she has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for twenty-seven years. She was poet laureate of Delaware 2001–7. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan. More info →
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Paperback
978-0-8214-2444-5
Retail price: $17.95,
T.
Release date: March 2021
88 pages
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5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4736-9
Release date: March 2021
88 pages
Rights: World
“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.”
Judith Kitchen, review of Brown's 1993 book, Do Not Peel the Birches, in the Georgia Review (Fall 1994)
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The poems in Julie Hanson’s second award-winning book inscribe deep stillness on a world of harmonies in motion, illustrating the movement between and among seasons and tasks, work and leisure, solitude and people, and all through private life as it intersects with the products and noises of industry and nature.
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In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one’s life and one’s livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one’s vision of the world.
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In Doubtful Harbor, Idris Anderson turns wandering into art. From large landscapes to the minutest details, she seeks with each poem to convey the world more clearly, acutely, and exquisitely. As she meditates on indelible moments with intimate others, friends, and strangers, she teases from these encounters their elusive connections and disconnections.
Animal Purpose
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In Animal Purpose, Michelle Y. Burke explores the lives of men and women as they stand poised between the desire to love and the compulsion to harm. She scours the hard edges of the world to find “fleeting softness,” which she wishes “into the world like pollen that covers everything.”
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