September 12

Published by Word Works Books, September 2021

Praise

“A more haunting memorial to 9/11 than this book will be hard to find.  Following a lyrical prelude that highlights the nearby Hudson River, the long prose poem of the title follows Andrea Carter Brown as she witnesses and flees from the Trade Center attacks just a block from her apartment.  The generous use of descriptive and narrative detail that makes these poems so memorable carries into elegy and aftermath, and finally into a landscape filled, like the opening poems, with quiet beauty.  Reading September 12 is a wrenching but restorative experience you won’t soon forget.” —Martha Collins, author of Because What Else Could I Do and White Papers

“In 2001, Andrea Carter Brown lived near the Twin Towers, and but for her sister’s anxious call on 9/11, she might have died there.  As she powerfully chronicles in September 12, instead, she survived to tell the tale.  An opening homage to the Hudson River School is entrancing.  Then, BAM.  Brown embarks on a harrowing narrative of life-altering survival, too shocked at first to feel but recording everything—including, unforgettably, the first view of the skyline with a “column of smoke” where the Towers had been (“September 12”).  This brave book documents great loss and trauma, but also hard-won psychic resilience in poems of astonishing beauty and wisdom.  September 12 is necessary poetry.” —Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth and Revenance

 “There are moments in time that pull into themselves all that has gone before, and settle like dust, or micro-organisms, upon and within all that follows after.  In Andrea Carter Brown's September 12, detail by detail, we watch the process of innocence captured by absolutely unpredicted trauma, and how the experience lives on and on, through shock and terror, through the kindness of strangers, through the heart of a beloved, through grief and elegy, through normality that will never again be normal.  Detail by detail.  Moment by moment.  Word by word. —Alicia Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After, Selected and New Poems, 2002-2019, New York State Poet Laureate 

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