The Sleep That Changed Everything
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Offering both subtle and immediate pleasures, Lee Ann Brown’s generous new book extends her unmistakable, original voice, every bit as Southern as it is avant-garde, gracious without being naive. Abounding in a playfulness of style, including songs and ballads, the poems in The Sleep That Changed Everything are by turns funny, serious, insightful and moving. Botanical and scientific language are used here as collage elements to chart cycles of desire and emotional transformation. Brown is committed to Whitman’s idea that we all have many selves; thus her work embraces the immediacy of the New York School, the personal and literary wildness of the Beats, the word play and political astuteness of Language poetry and an eroticism all her own. In poems that are both highly literate and plain-spoken, Brown makes the life of the soul directly available in all its renegade garb.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Everything seems real decadent as the decade rolls up," writes Brown in this enormous, huge-hearted second collection, and it seems truer than ever as the new decade rolls further out. Brown's debut, Polyverse, made a joyful, polyphonic noise in 1999, and this Sleep,collecting more than five years of work, is less somnolent than restorative and wonderfully wakeful. Brown's poems were a feature of the hugely distributed dELiA's freebie book How 2 Write Love Poems that Don't Suck, and she amply makes good on that book's promise here. "Insufflation" finds her speaker "Setting myself up to be toughened/ a spectrum of hair/ Unanthologized Beat/ spun out into/ reading," while the book's central series, "The Voluptuary Lion Poems of Spring," teases that "my poetry/ Risks gushing kisses so I close my song,/ Anticipating our playing alone." While poems like the evil-channeling "Ballad of Susan Smith" ("Black Man, Black Man, I accuse you") show Brown reviving a turbulent genre to terrific effect, the sheer number of joyous allusions, invocations and dedications here along with sections of "Estivation," "Devastation" and "Vibratory Odes" make this a book a primer of democratic loving, working to "Make a new life/ For those around us fully/ and for those/ To come// To come/ To."
