A Little Grief Break by Derrick C. Brown

The new book is coming! Pre-order SOON. Launches Nov 21.

A Little Grief Break is a tasty, thirty-year retrospective from one of contemporary poetry's most electrifying voices—a collection that refuses to sit still. Derrick C. Brown has spent three decades honing a singular poetic style that marries devastating emotional precision with sharp humor, bar-stool philosophy with literary craft, and the raw immediacy of performance with the carefully wrought architecture of the page.

This almost 300-page collection gathers the essential poems from Brown's ten previous books alongside nineteen new works in Night Collapser, creating a portrait of a poet who has never stopped taking risks. Here are poems that detonate with laughter before breaking your heart in the next breath. Poems about love that acknowledge love's absurdity without diminishing its power. Elegies that refuse easy comfort. Celebrations that don't ignore the darkness gathering at their edges.

Brown writes with the fearlessness of a former paratrooper and the precision of a jeweler. His poems are inhabited by grief-struck fathers and waitresses with secrets, by motorcycles and monsoons, by all the beautiful wreckage of being alive and paying attention. He can pivot from cosmic to comic in a single stanza, finding profundity in dive bars and divinity in the mundane. His work carries the energy of three decades performing in intimate venues and theaters—readings that feel like Sigur Rós meets Steve Martin meets Kerouac—but every poem on the page demonstrates a master craftsman who understands that the wildest performances still require architecture.

Whether chronicling subtle heartbreak, weird romance, or the small murders of daily living, Brown's poetry operates on a frequency all its own—simultaneously hilarious and haunting, formally inventive yet accessible, intellectual without pretension. This is poetry that trusts its readers' intelligence while never forgetting that poems should move us, shake us, remake us.

A Little Grief Break is essential reading for anyone who believes poetry can be both serious art and a damn good time, that craft and accessibility aren't enemies, and that the most important question we can ask isn't "is this poetry?" but "does this change me?" Brown's answer, accumulated across thirty years, is a resounding yes.

BLURBS

A Little Grief Break yokes together thirty years of dynamic work from a singular and vital poet. The poems in this collection are brimming over with voice and humor and hurt and all the rich particulars of an adventurous and attentive life. I've been mesmerised getting to witness Derrick cast these spells aloud in bars, theaters, and basements for the past fifteen years and am so grateful for this collection in which he's assembled a home for that magic from a language we all share. 

—    Sam Sax, author of PIG, YR DEAD

Most poets seem keen to check the ingredients on boxes or to run out of burning buildings, not Derrick Brown. Buy this book! A Little Grief Break is all charm and language and daring under flame-retardant humor, which is me saying, his tropical heart never vacations, and he sings more courageously than any newly arrived poet in hipster boots. The difference? His poems are honed, quick-witted, and settle scores only with himself. Look at how he wildly grins behind his helmet of wit, going in, flares flickering off its cracked glass.

— Major Jackson, author of Leaving Saturn, Razzle Dazzle