Poetry. As lush as Rossetti, as energetic as O'Hara, as intense as Mayakofsky, Brandon Downing writes with masterful abandon. "The blood is my age / Met me afterwards / Illegal sound lines // Making it something / So many illegal / The corridor clones / You convex fences // Illegal and lights / Doing bravery lights / Windmills and me / Illegal heights" (from "Introduction V"). The poems in this collection have been widely published in such journals as LUNGFULL!, FENCE, THE GERM, CONDUIT, and NEW AMERICAN WRITING. Brandon Downing is the founding editor of the magazine 6,500, and his books include Lazio and Gog & Horsey Pictures.

The Shirt Weapon

Literature & Fiction

Downing, Brandon

Poetry

Germ Press

Poetry. DARK BRANDON is Brandon Downing's follow-up to his previous collection, THE SHIRT WEAPON. Continuing the earlier book's explorations of narrativity and false autobiography, DARK BRANDON makes use of 'castoff' modalities of American visual culture: the failed commercial, the forgotten b-picture, the county fair program, the lost advertising icon, the epic blockbuster. "There's a deceptive density in DARK BRANDON: deceptive because the tone is often exuberant and that exuberance acts as a kind of stoner Virgil leading you through the craziness of the work. But you also register that he's enjoying himself, and that joy in piecing it together is an absolute necessity if one is going to take the deal of making art up at all in this age when manipulation of image and language is accepted to the point of ho-hum. Strange, beautiful."--Anselm Berrigan.

Dark Brandon

Faux Press

Poetry. Full of linguistic jouissance and graphic beauty, Brandon Downing's latest release, the chapbook AT ME from Octopus Books, may be the best reparation for that irreparable language, American.

AT ME

Octopus Books

"Downing's greatest achievement so far. . . . It is made up entirely of collages of vintage art . . . and he has delicately illustrated these weird landscapes with text cut from old books. . . . Lake Antiquity makes it clear that Downing is a genius of juxtaposition."—The Stranger

Lake Antiquity

United States

Fence Books

Brandon Downing, whose Lake Antiquity beguilingly combined painstaking full-color collage with painstaking found poetry and painstaking visual bravado, returns with this collection of new poems, his fourth. You'll be laughing about flotsam, you'll be crying about jetsam. There is nothing but supernaturally canny vernacular to hold on to in these poems, but there is excessive cultural material to dream about.
Wait for me, Raymond Carver! You piece of shoot!
The girls are too solo, not herd things, Dirty butt, jelly-jar weed-heads,
Tiny chiggers leaving huge welts, That is the world waits in the woods.
Me, I can't buy enough Giclee prints To cover the guile accreting on my walls!
What was that all about btw, Those donut bushes and Sprite
Ladders running up over the defensive Walls of our new youth clinic? WTF?
Brandon Downing is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area, now living in New York City. His collections include The Shirt Weapon, Dark Brandon, and Lake Antiquity.

Mellow Actions (Fence Modern Poets)