Overview

Collier Brown’s Scrap Bones reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” No angels or flying horses here, just panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit. And yet, resilient are the muses in this collection—the bees, the starlings, the dragonflies—skimming over the wastes. The Sabine Series in Literature ... from “Orion, Break” they’re sleeping in their homes, they’re waking from their beds, they’re at their desks and on a call. They’re unimpressed. That’s not your fault. Nor your concern. I’m tired of images, of lines and dots and codes. When I step into the dark, I only want the novas and the nowheres in between, and if I’m very lucky— if I’ve beaten all the odds— just one, naÏve fluoresce of the insect who is its own hello/goodbye.

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9781680033090

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"""Scrap Bones, from the celebrated poet Collier Brown, cuts to the heart of the world we inhabit, a world shaped by memories of the past, a world where heroes don't care if truth is truth or just a big fat lie. Whichever style makes music dire, or makes the dog on scrap bones smile. Read it straight through, and it will bring laughter, tears, and especially wonder. A stunning, elegant, beguiling book."" --John Stauffer, Kates Professor of English and African and African American Studies, Harvard University ""Attention and anticlimax, 'opulent/ desolations of/ the filing cabinet, ' wisdom and photography, 'a plain Wheat Thin' against 'a million ghosts, ' and getting up and getting by: these poems get where they go through an enticing mixture of verbal care and common sense, a handle on anxiety that's always in danger of going too far, like an angel straining to pick up a fish, or Michael Longley meeting W. C. Williams in a Louisiana wood (and telling him sonnets and tetrameters are, too, very American: these rule). There are worlds in between those worlds, and Collier Brown has seen them, along with their dragonfly-strewn, gently rhymed lake, and the anxiety lizard--no, really, read 'The Escape, ' read it now!--that may live in you too. 'Are you okay? Are you/ okay?' the poet asks his beloved, and the gesture feels more than okay: it feels needed, and balanced, and lovely and full of heart. 'Who's the story for?' It's for you, lucky reader. It's waiting for you."" --Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids"

Author Information

Collier Brown is the author of Eye, Thus Far, Unplucked (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2017), To the Wheatlight of June (21st Editions, 2013), and Moth and Bonelight (21st Editions, 2010). His essays on photography have appeared in over twenty books, and he is the founding editor of Od Review (www.odreview.com). Brown teaches at Harvard University.

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