Derrick C. Brown's 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.
Brown has spent three decades honing a singular poetic style that marries bar-stool philosophy with literary craft. A Little Grief Breakis essential reading for anyone who believes poetry can be both serious art and a damn good time. Here are poems that detonate with laughter before breaking your heart in the next breath. Poems that acknowledge love's absurdity without diminishing its power. Brown trusts his readers' intelligence, while never forgetting that poems should move us, shake us, remake us.
The most important question we can ask isn't "is this poetry?" but "does this change me?" Brown's answer is a resounding yes.
Your kiss was fast medicine, zipped into my gums. Your skin is a museum of new snow.
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Derrick C. Brown is a novelist, comedian, poet, librettist, gondolier and storyteller from Long Beach, California. He is the winner of the 2013 Texas Book of the Year Award for Poetry and the current Poet Laureate of Los Feliz.
