Brownwood

$19.95

by Lawrence Bridges

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.”

by Lawrence Bridges

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.”

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 Drums and 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.

Advanced Praise

“… 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, Horses on Drums

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

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