Brownwood by Lawrence Bridges

Brownwood

by Lawrence Bridges

$19.95

Brownwood, like Berryman’s Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an “other” character, con-structed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist’s identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, “Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he’s a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book’s poetic plot … arrives with cinematographic aplomb.” Bridges’s third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: “Feared as a monster, tame as a clown.”

“… a dazzling procession of images, attitudes, and ideas, which exhibit a certain logic but achieve most of their meaning by implication.… His poems pose philosophical questions, but … the poems are enormously compressed, often tense with unresolved or even unresolv-able emotion.”
—Dana Gioia, on Horses on Drums

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  • Description

  • Brownwood, like Berryman’s Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an “other” character, con-structed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist’s identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, “Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he’s a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book’s poetic plot … arrives with cinematographic aplomb.” Bridges’s third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: “Feared as a monster, tame as a clown.”

    Format: paperback
    ISBN: 978-1-936797-79-0

  • About The Author

  • Lawrence Bridges’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, and he is author of two previous collections, Horses on Drumsand Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2006 and 2009). He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” initiative, and as a film director, editor, and graphic designer he has been honored for his film, music video, and advertising work with Emmy nominations and many film festival awards, including a “Gold Lion” at Cannes. He lives in Los Angeles.

  • Critics' Reviews

  • Critical Acclaim

    “… a dazzling procession of images, attitudes, and ideas, which exhibit a certain logic but achieve most of their meaning by implication.… His poems pose philosophical questions, but … the poems are enormously compressed, often tense with unresolved or even unresolv-able emotion.” — Dana Gioia, on Horses on Drums

    “Reading these lovely, brainy poems is like stepping into a boat wearing a blindfold.” — Diane Middlebrook, on Flip Days

  • Excerpts

  • A Head of Lettuce Is Stuck in the Air Shaft

    The shaky old scarecrow came with its smile across a stubble field.
    Each rising took me farther from the start of this. You feel the floor
    beneath your shoes, a lavender of owl’s clover, the wind of swift
    justice. In a heavy-gravity corridor, this desert had the lungs to blow
    down trucks. I didn’t get up early to suffer, to whine back with
    the doves’ falsetto plea. The dog barked all night at something
    invisible. It’s better to be insane and do the thinking.

  • Weight

  • 0.4 lbs

  • Dimensions

  • 6 × .5 × 9 in

  • Awards

  • No Information
Brownwood, like Berryman’s Henry, is a triad (I, He, You), an “other” character, con-structed within a real-life geography in an arsenal of time and place. Lawrence Bridges offers Polaroid graphics of his protagonist’s identity in the thick of our culture, amid the changing rules of fate and folly. As Elena Karina Byrne observes in her Foreword, “Brownwood is full of angst, wry humor, and sarcasm; he’s a lost twin, doppelganger, living in a melancholy place [and] this book’s poetic plot … arrives with cinematographic aplomb.” Bridges’s third volume of poems is like an autobiography of one stuck inside the vessel of who he is: “Feared as a monster, tame as a clown.”

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-79-0

Lawrence Bridges’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, and he is author of two previous collections, Horses on Drumsand Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2006 and 2009). He created a series of literary documentaries for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” initiative, and as a film director, editor, and graphic designer he has been honored for his film, music video, and advertising work with Emmy nominations and many film festival awards, including a “Gold Lion” at Cannes. He lives in Los Angeles.

Critical Acclaim

“… a dazzling procession of images, attitudes, and ideas, which exhibit a certain logic but achieve most of their meaning by implication.… His poems pose philosophical questions, but … the poems are enormously compressed, often tense with unresolved or even unresolv-able emotion.” — Dana Gioia, on Horses on Drums

“Reading these lovely, brainy poems is like stepping into a boat wearing a blindfold.” — Diane Middlebrook, on Flip Days

A Head of Lettuce Is Stuck in the Air Shaft

The shaky old scarecrow came with its smile across a stubble field.
Each rising took me farther from the start of this. You feel the floor
beneath your shoes, a lavender of owl’s clover, the wind of swift
justice. In a heavy-gravity corridor, this desert had the lungs to blow
down trucks. I didn’t get up early to suffer, to whine back with
the doves’ falsetto plea. The dog barked all night at something
invisible. It’s better to be insane and do the thinking.

0.4 lbs
6 × .5 × 9 in
No Information