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Mortality, With Friends is a collection of lyrical essays from
Fleda Brown, a writer and caretaker, of her father and sometimes
her husband, who lives with the nagging uneasiness that her cancer
could return. Memoir in feel, the book muses on the nature of art,
of sculpture, of the loss of bees and trees, the end of marriages,
and among other things, the loss of hearing and of life itself.
Containing twenty-two essays, Mortality, With Friends follows the
cascade of loss with the author's imminent joy in opening a path to
track her own growing awareness and wisdom. In ""Donna,"" Brown
examines a childhood friendship and questions the roles we need to
play in each other's lives to shape who we might become. In
""Native Bees,"" Brown expertly weaves together the threads of a
difficult family tradition intended to incite happiness with the
harsh reality of current events. In ""Fingernails, Toenails,"" she
marvels at the attention and suffering that accompanies caring for
our aging bodies. In ""Mortality, with Friends,"" Brown dives into
the practical and stupefying response to her own cancer and
survival. In ""2019: Becoming Mrs. Ramsay,"" she remembers the
ghosts of her family and the strident image of herself, positioned
in front of her Northern Michigan cottage. Comparable to Lia
Purpura's essays in their density and poetics, Brown's intent is to
look closely, to stay with the moment and the image. Readers with a
fondness for memoir and appreciation for art will be dazzled by the
beauty of this collection.
A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and
apocalypse. Golda Meir once said, "Old age is like a plane flying
through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do."
The poems in Fleda Brown's brave collection, her thirteenth, take
readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are
plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal:
the death of a father, a child's terminal cancer, the extinction of
bees, and environmental degradation. Brown's poems are wise,
honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science,
physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary
artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses,
as well as to life's terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are
beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows
lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other
side.
The Woods Are On Fire is Fleda Brown's deeply human and intensely
felt poetic explorations of her life and world. Her account
includes her brain-damaged brother, a rickety family cottage, a
puzzling and sometimes frightening father, a timid mother, and the
adult life that follows with its loves, divorces, and serious
illnesses. Visually and emotionally rich, Brown's poems call on
Einstein, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Law and Order, Elvis, and
Beethoven. They stand before the Venus de Milo as well as the moon,
as they measure distances between what we make as art and who we
are as humans. In wide-ranging forms-from the sestina to prose
poems-they focus on the natural world as well as the Delaware
legislature and the inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton. The
Woods Are On Fire includes nearly fifty new poems, along with poems
selected from seven previous books, showcasing an influential
American poet's work over the last few decades.
All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of
which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is
that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations
of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet's gift,
into something more. This is an unconventional memoir. A series of
lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during
the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up
to one woman's story while simultaneously reflecting the story of
her times. A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless
mother, a mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor:
folded into Brown's reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences
of family and marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and
self-knowledge. Whether reflecting on the automobile industry or a
wrenching parting from beloved pets or the process of aging,
Brown's telling rings with great humor, profound perception, and a
lyricism that makes even the most commonplace moment uncommonly
good reading.
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Reunion (Paperback)
Fleda Brown; Edited by Ronald Wallace
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R470
Discovery Miles 4 700
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The poems in "Reunion" insistently turn back toward sources: toward
home and the idea of home, toward the body, and toward objects that
return us to ourselves. They always surprise, moving from quantum
mechanics, wildflowers, and a Bobcat driver to a woman killed by a
flying deer, magma becoming rock, and an invasion of flying ants.
Fleda Brown deftly unites daily frustrations and suffering with
profound psychological, physical, and cosmic questions.
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Reunion (Hardcover)
Fleda Brown; Edited by Ronald Wallace
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R835
Discovery Miles 8 350
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The poems in "Reunion" insistently turn back toward sources:
toward home and the idea of home, toward the body, and toward
objects that return us to ourselves. They always surprise, moving
from quantum mechanics, wildflowers, and a Bobcat driver to a woman
killed by a flying deer, magma becoming rock, and an invasion of
flying ants. Fleda Brown deftly unites daily frustrations and
suffering with profound psychological, physical, and cosmic
questions.
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