Böcker av Laynie Browne

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.

Author's note: Intaglio Daughters is an homage text for the poet Lyn Hejinian. All titles (in italics above each poem) are taken from her book The Unfollowing. In the preface to her book she writes "I wanted each line to be as difficult to accept on the basis of the previous and subsequent lines as death is for we who are alive-a comparison that I make intentionally, since my intention in writing the sequence of poems I'm calling 'The Unfollowing' was to compose a set of elegies." In considering a form for Intaglio Daughters I wondered-what follows loss and rupture? What follows unfollowing? The mourning process often involves a non-sequential experience of time-and many returns, wavelike, in spirals or contractions. In keeping with this idea of rounds, sinuous or labyrinth-time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, my book is a series of rondels, with the final line in each poem returning to, and resounding Hejinian's language.

From poet, novelist, and teacher Laynie Brown comes Translating the Lilies Back into Lists, an homage text to the poet C. D. Wright.

Fiction. "Laynie Browne channels the energy of Mira in a book that is both charred and luminous. Her writing is a gift of abrasion, making the body of the reader a portal too. Who is arriving? Who is very near? The intensity of this narrative carried me through the summer in which I read it. Browne is a genius of aperture and stance. All desire, she has written a remarkable book. It changes something to read it (the book) and to have it near. If you are reading these words, then you have found your way to Browne's work and her immense, compassionate and tender genius as a writer and a human being."--Bhanu Kapil

Laynie Browne investigates the limits and potential of the world before memory, before language and before the senses have separated, in her book of poetry, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. Browne guides the reader through the intricate development of human perception.