Mouth Trap

"This book is full of terribly glorious clamor." Vanessa Baish, Entropy Magazine

Rebbecca Brown's prose poetry collection renders birds, beasts, and surroundings from the lens of an artist who structures form with feeling. Acute observations are captured with music and tangled in emotion. Through the creation of portraits and landscapes, Brown fashions an exhibit of dynamic lyricism and word play. Speakers experience the biological as ephemeral, all the while bewildered by the promise of transformation.

"I don't know what to call these, and neither will you-protest poems or tiny prose laments? But as a speaker in one of them says, it's not actions that are taboo, but the breaking of silences that surround them. And so, poet Rebbecca Brown sets out to smash them to pieces, all the dark unsaids rising up from soil and field, root and vine, barn and cell, blood and booze and loveless boys and girls to haunt our reading and contaminate our dreams. In equal measure, anguish and outrage, unsilenced, refuse to be anything but mouthy and here now in this strange and all-too familiar world where women give birth to bees, earth swells, and heat is heat. Downhome Americana has never sounded off as lyrical-or as brutal or tormented-as in the countless beating wings and throats of Brown's ecstatic testaments to our sad humanity." Katharine Haake, author of Assumptions We Might Make About the Postworld and The Time of Quarantine