Poetry. Women's Studies. 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, ...
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Poetry. Women's Studies. 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.
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