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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Domestic Karma
Published by Finishing Line Press, October 2018
Praise
“Fires and fronts move through the landscape in Domestic Karma, where moths, butterflies, spiders, snakes and a shrike’s impaled prey all find their place. Skiffs set out, guided by the moon and stars with Brown at the helm and laundry for sails. Anniversaries circle like spokes of a wheel from bardo to bardo. Venus pops above the clouds. Brown is a seer. Brown is curious. Is it a finch or a waxwing? Her tools are history, geography, the past, and a birder’s wicked eye. Nothing need shield us. Lucky was. Lucky is. Lucky. Listen.” –Scott Hightower, Author of Self-evident
“In Domestic Karma, Andrea Carter Brown mines with deft formal restraint the rich material of her verse, which ranges from the trauma of New York on 9/11, to the quiet celebration of her husband’s remission from cancer, and—in a contrapuntal reckoning at the collection’s heart, “August 6th”—a meditation on the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the internment of Americans of Japanese origin during WWII. Brown writes a taut, sonically intricate poetry of exquisite observation, profound conscience, and humane intelligence whose “insistent song” just might redeem us.” –Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth
“Birds in the trees, winds in our dreams, ghosts in the words, birds as words: there’s so much lovely transmogrification in the fine new poems of Andrea Carter Brown, we find ourselves often on the borders of things, where this is indeed that, and gloriously so. But nothing’s too pretty for these pretty poems, given the history for which we are all accountable—the Holocaust and 9/11 figure prominently here, too—even as the poet wisely knows that there’s love to be found all over, lots and lots of careless love. How wonderful to be in the presence of these elegant artworks, singing along with this terrific writer to the tunes in our blood, discomfited and convivial, scared and delighted.” –Alan Michael Parker, author of The Ladder
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The Disheveled Bed
Published by CavanKerry Press, March 2006
Praise
“Andrea Carter Brown writes well by training her intelligence and keen attention on matters of heartfelt importance, and her poems come alive with all the pleasure and pain of living with eyes open. Most memorably in this collection, Brown records the disappointments and courage of a woman unable to bear the children she and her husband want. Without hedges or illusions, the poems present the crucial details of clinical visits, miscarriage, mourning, and the persistent difficulty of sustaining and reconstructing oneself, one’s marriage, and the world. The Disheveled Bed reverberates with the complexities of a whole life, tested by its particular turnings. The poems celebrate the strength of mind and the art that find truths in experience unblurred by evasion. —Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry
“The precision and wit of Andrea Carter Brown’s language transform events that are agressively mundane into exemplars of human enterprise. Her book joins those which subject the increasing medicalization of contempoary life to poetry’s scrutiny. But above all, she is a nature poet of urban life.” —Marilyn Hacker, author of A Stranger’s Mirror
“Andrea Carter Brown’s remarkable debut book, The Disheveled Bed, may be disheveled in circumstance, but never in craft or intensity. The poems here amount to the chapters in a love story of such power, resonance, sadness, and happiness that I hardly know where to begin to recommend them. Filled with passionate craft, a collected wisdom, and the heartbreaking story of a woman and a man in search of a child who find themselves instead, The Disheveled Bed is the first book of poems every poet dreams of: naturally intelligent, unselfconscious, yet knowing, with a full chiaroscuro of hope and pain. It is like a banquet set among shadows. Here, sit, read, and feast.” —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst
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Brook & Rainbow
Published by The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, April 2001
2000 Chapbook Competition Winner