Böcker av Fleda Brown

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 "e;Donna,"e; 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 "e;Native Bees,"e; Brown expertly weaves together the threads of a difficult family tradition intended to incite happiness with the harsh reality of current events. In "e;Fingernails, Toenails,"e; she marvels at the attention and suffering that accompanies caring for our aging bodies. In "e;Mortality, with Friends,"e; Brown dives into the practical and stupefying response to her own cancer and survival. In "e;2019: Becoming Mrs. Ramsay,"e; 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, theres nothing you can do. The poems in Fleda Browns 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 childs terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation.Browns 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 lifes 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.

Contains poems that turn back toward sources: toward home and the idea of home, toward the body, and toward objects that return us to ourselves. They move 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.

Offer a deeply human and intensely felt poetic explorations of Fleda Brown's 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.

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.