paper • 76 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-42-0
little dark is a hybrid collection of poems and prose threaded together by an act of memoir. Here Brennan ruminates about “being” in the world, about her particular “self” through the tiny, distorted and often occluded aperture of memory. These poems have as their obsession “seeing” and “looking” and the failure of these acts to reveal anything definitive about our lives; instead little dark affirms mystery, the dissolution of boundaries between the seen and unseen (or forgotten) world.
“Who Will,” from little dark:
If you want me to sing if you want me to talk to you
The idea a shadow swept of muscle
The skin of the world searingly flayed
Things shudder inside things on & on
A person’s tiny humming brain for instance
Nothing new: tall shuddering blue everywhere
Later in the restaurant the music made me cry
If you want me to stay here always or leave or die
You were still in a coma your blue eyes briefly
“There is a dream, a Traum, of tenderness in little dark, and in the dream, fast birds race against death. Loosed from memory, the truth of love hastens towards heaven on earth. In the imaged measure of these poems, Karen Brennan indites a new remonstrance. Her protest is every petal of a rose.” – Donald Revell
“Brennan’s is a poetics that creates form as it rises and enters air. But the voice of the book also sinks and enters earth. Here the elements of a life are animated, under hypnosis and talking. The poems, Zen-like. Like Gaudi’s open cathedral in Barcelona, they do not have ceilings or limits. They have an articulated self (a little dark) navigating a wildly populated and open sky.” – Barbara Cully
[…] to read more? You can find Brennan’s book at Four Way Books—a press we admire deeply, and behind which is the amazing energy of Co-Editor Sally Ball (a […]