How do we experience the world before memory, before language, before the senses have separated, or before the concepts of “you” and “I” have been distinguished? Laynie Browne investigates both the limits and potential of such an inchoate world in her new book of poetry, Drawing of a Swan Before Memory.In a series of elegant prose poems, Browne guides the reader through the intricate development of human perception, where the haunting vastness of childhood slowly gives way to the defining features of adult cognition. Subtly nuanced verse constructs a world of color before sight and utterance before language―all the while aware that, ironically, language itself makes this ethereal world possible.

Drawing of a Swan Before Memory: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.)

Literature & Fiction

Browne, Laynie

Poetry

University of Georgia Press

Here In Garments Worn By Lindens, Laynie Browne begins a project she terms "homage text" for the poet Rosmarie Waldrop. All titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken from Waldrop's book, Lawn of Excluded Middle, originally published by Tender Buttons Press in 1993. As Browne's sequence progresses, echoes of Waldrop's text occur throughout the work with slight alternations. This new book continues to investigate gender, perception, personhood as well as permissions to invoke and explore all "excluded middles." In this way, Browne rewrites, responds to, and refigures the material of language in a way that echoes the way Waldrop works with Wittgenstein's sentences making them utterly new in only the way a poet can. In Lawn of Excluded Middle, Rosmarie Waldrop writes: "Poetry an alternate less linear logic." Here, Laynie Browne weaves an intricate, intertextual poem of associational praise into a new practice, a new form.

In Garments Worn By Lindens

Tender Buttons Press

Poetry. "Laynie Browne's alchemically applied linguistics unfold the space between poem and prose, revealing a crepuscular zone 'where it's warm enough to stop on the street'" -Lee Ann Brown.

Rebecca Letters

History & Criticism

Kelsey Street Press

Roseate, Points of Gold

Dusie Press

Poetry. "Dear reader: practice opening this book, practice turning its pages, practice reading these words and returning to them, and practice these practices repeatedly. Laynie Browne has written a wondrous guide book that doesn't show us where we have not yet been, but more importantly, more beautifully, returns us to where we are—in this body that is mine, this body that breathes, this mind that thinks (or thinks it thinks). Make no mistake, these poems each are small forms of best advice, showing that truest courage requires endless opening to the moment one is in. Lucky for us, the days come as these poems do, one following another, each promising that we have yet another chance to practice what matters most, to arrive in that exalted attention in which the mind's devotion and the arm's embrace and the body's nerves and the lung's deep breath are one. Browne is a poet unrivalled in the generosities she offers her readers, and so we have now, again, a book that knows the gift is in the work, and the work takes practice."—Dan Beachy-Quick

P R A C T I C E

SplitLevel Texts

Is there such a thing as a 'poet's novel, ' a text which uniquely traverses boundaries between genres? Why do poets turn to prose? If such a form does exist, how is it characterized? The Poet's Novel, a talk by Laynie Browne, presented with drawings by Noah Saterstrom, examines this erratic, hybrid and often elusive form. Writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Lydia Davis, among others. Poet and novelist Laynie Browne is the editor of a forthcoming collection of essays, A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel.

The Poet's Novel as a Form of Defiance: Indeterminate Frame

Kin Press

How does one in mourning converse with those absent, yet ever present? How is a motherless daughter conceived? What befalls those who succumb to waves of grief akin to contractions of birth? You Envelop Me is woven from contemplative practices that permit us to approach the unimaginable. The world with the beloved removed is permanently altered, perhaps most significantly in the way the living learn that indispensable vision occurs beyond the visible world.

You Envelop Me

Omnidawn

Amelia has the ability to levitate. During her wanderings through dream galleries, costumed performances, and future libraries she meets Clara (an elusive photographer), Sebastion (part human, part lion) and a chorus of cynics who exist only in partial bodies. In this voyage into the illusion of identity, Laynie Browne serves us a psychological portrait of the creative act. This challenging first novel is a high-wire act of great beauty and invention. Part quest narrative, part ghost story, Acts of Levitation is ultimately a study in longing—for the “other” who might be lover or sibling, and for the “self” hidden in the center of a dream. Laynie Browne enlists all the colors of the spectrum, and then some, to spin her magic. Her writing unfolds like a pre-Raphaelite dawn, expanding outwards and always mesmerizing. Lewis Warsh An ultra femme, absolutely exquisite writing/vision. Acts is extraordinarily imaginative and remains with me as a luminous benchmark. Lissa Wolsak Part mystery and part Oz story, Acts is a narrative of exquisite disappearances and re-appearances... As always, Laynie Browne’s work is ephemeral, complex, and alluring. Lisa Jarnot

Acts of Levitation

Contemporary

Spuyten Duyvil

Poetry. "As if each hypothesis were a parasol which slightly changed the light, Laynie Browne's poems contain privileged messages from the spirit world that must be shielded from the direct rays of reality because such information might so easily disintegrate, remaining unrecognizable under the harsh glare and preoccupied manner of contemporary scrutiny. In their hushed, yet deliberate path, these works constitute a labyrinth, a gentle, ritual encircling of the tidal voice of alchemy; whose secrets are not offered to be revealed but to be reveled in,and then departed from, so that their unknowable nature may remain untouched, permitting us to leave transformed--and exhilarated"--Nick Piombino.

Mermaid's Purse

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.

The Scented Fox (National Poetry Series)

United States

Wave Books

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