Laynie Browne – författare

Poetry that considers how we live with constant shifts, positioning alchemy as an example of endless change.  The poetry of Laynie Browne’s Apprentice to a Breathing Hand explores alchemy, connectivity, and perception. Throughout the collection, Browne considers the formation and limits of personhood, the experience of a body moving through time, and the imperative to continually learn and unlearn. Browne looks to alchemy as a practice for cultivating the impossible, positioning it as a fitting model for our current moment. In the material of language, meaning must be unmade and remade endlessly, and in this continual regeneration, Browne considers the alchemy of how a poem can in turn transform the poet. Moving through methods of making and unmaking, the collection centers on the figure of an apprentice working in a space of indeterminacy, lack, breath, and constant shifting.

A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet’s Novel provides a unique entrance to the rare prose of many remarkable modern and contemporary poets including Etel Adnan, Renee Gladman, Langston Hughes, Kevin Killian, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leslie Scalapino, Jack Spicer, and Jean Toomer, whose approaches to the novel defy conventions of plot, character, setting, and action. Contributors: Brian Blanchfield, Anne Boyer, John Keene, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo, and C. D. Wright bring a variety of insights, approaches, and writing styles to the subject with creative and often surprisingresults.Kazim Ali on Fanny HoweDan Beachy-Quick on W.G. SebaldEdmund Berrigan on Ted BerriganBrian Blanchfield on Aaron KuninRachel Blau DuPlessis on Gertrude SteinJulia Bloch on Gwendolyn BrooksAnne Boyer on Elizabeth Barrett BrowningTraci Brimhall on Hilda HilstVincent Broqua on Stacy DorisBrandon Brown on Kevin KillianLee Ann Brown on Carla HarrymanAngela Carr on Nicole BrossardJulie Carr on Lyn HejinianNorma Cole on Emmanuel HocquardBrent Cunningham on Laura MoriartyMónica de la Torre on Martín AdánMarcella Durand on Robert CreeleyPatrick Durgin on Tan Lin & Pamela LuNorman Fischer on Phillip WhalenC.S. Giscombe on Audre LordeJudith Goldman on Leslie ScalapinoCarla Harryman on Gail ScottJeanne Heuving on Theresa Hak Kyung ChaLaura Hinton on Alice NotleyDaniel Katz on Jack SpicerJohn Keene on Fernando PessoaKarla Kelsey on Barbara GuestAaron Kunin on Lewis CarrollSonnet L’Abbé on M. NourbeSe PhilipAbigail Lang on Jacques RoubaudKimberly Lyons on Mina Loy W. Jason Miller on Langston HughesMette Moestrup on Ingeborg Bachmann Laura Moriarty on Keith WaldropLaura Mullen on Bhanu Kapil Denise Newman on Inger Christensen Aldon Lynn Nielsen on Amiri BarakaGeoffrey G. O’Brien on John Ashbery & James SchuylerJena Osman on Thalia FieldJulie Patton on Jean Toomer Elizabeth Robinson on Rosmarie Waldrop Jennifer Scappettone on H.D. Susan Scarlata on Forrest Gander Brandon Shimoda on Etel Adnan Cedar Sigo on Eileen Myles Sasha Steensen on Anne Carson Donna Stonecipher on Peter Waterhouse Brian Teare on Rainer Maria Rilke Tyrone Williams on Nathaniel MackeyC.D. Wright on Michael OndaatjeLynn Xu on Ben LernerRachel Zolf on Juliana Spahr

Selected by Alice Notley for the National Poetry Series, Laynie Browne's sixth collection casts a spell. In these fragmented poetic tales, characters disappear and reemerge, their charms reconfigured, their stories unraveling, their happy endings elusive. The book's coda consists of a fantastical poetic dictionary, asking readers to redefine their sense of meaning. Laynie Browne was born in 1966 and grew up in Los Angeles. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Daily Sonnets and Mermaid's Purse. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington Bothell and Mills College.

Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.

Laynie Browne's latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language, and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation Browne's exquisite collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.