82 Pages
©2014
Publisher: Brooklyn Arts Press
Purchase includes: EPUB, MOBI & PDF

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Poems of desire, romantic poems, poems written for a beloved other they are often overlooked in contemporary literature, arriving from a genre once heralded as a necessary thematic excursion for any poet worthy of the title, though having since been, through ubiquity, relegated to a lower tier, as if appetites and passions were finally outed as passe , the banal concerns of a different era. Yet here is Erika Jo Brown's incredible debut, inhabiting the same unsafe places explored by Neruda, Yeats, Rossetti, Keats, Whitman not light verse, but whimsical and mysterious, quixotic, fearful and ecstatic. This is what love breeds, what it encapsulates but cannot seem to hold: an uncertainty that makes living worth it.

In love poems that re-imagine a luxuriant tradition that goes back to The Song of Songs, Erika Jo Brown displays a captivating intelligence, a generous and often fierce and ambivalent sensibility, and a formidable verbal gift that calls to mind Berryman. Every line sparkles with life, wit, and humor. To the beloved (the reader) she offers what poets have always offered in their endeavor to express love: as much of the world as can fit into a poem which is a lot!—Geoffrey Nutter

Erika Jo Brown is from New York. Her chapbook, What a Lark!, was published by Further Adventures Press in 2011. She was educated at Cornell University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Capote Fellow in Poetry. Most recently, Brown taught at Savannah State University and co-curated the Seersucker Shots reading series. Brown is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston.