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“This is a compelling book that mines the hurt of human life to great effect. It contains tragedy and irony, splashes of humour, failure, love, insight and song…but mostly it contains bravery. Read it—it is really good.” —Sue Butler, Poetry Salzburg Review
Lyrical, philosophical, and inventive poems.
The Real Enough World speculates about the invention of self and world in the act of writing poems. Like orchestral movements, the poems vary in tonal qualities and speed, moving from sensibility-driven, antic poems through a deeply personal series of narratives to poems of philosophical reflection where landscape and love operate as tropes for each other. Underlying the whole is the poet’s sense that the material of life, as well as language, is insoluble and impermanent—humorous, tragic, absurd, joyous. Even when the mood of the book is most surreal, it is grounded in its accounts of the real enough.
“Any word this remarkable writer touches seems shaken awake.”—Mark Doty, author of School of the Arts
“The irrepressible Karen Brennan is upending writing again. She’s knocked the pillars out from under our assumptions about the limits of irony and wit with one very graceful movement from comedy to tragedy.” —Jane Miller, author of A Palace of Pearls
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
From the Book:
If I could lose my breath, Dear God, let it be now,
I used to think. Because it was glorious.
You felt the clouds race into your lungs & you knew
we were all composed of everything.
Not only blood but grass; not only skin but layers
of flaked time.
Therefore, somewhere is my lost memory.
Among the dizzy leaves of cottonwood
or sticking to a rock
like "where's Waldo,"
waiting to be spotted.
This in my heart I know. Though I can't prove it.
from “R” in the “Wherefore Here With Thee” section
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KAREN BRENNAN is Professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of Here On Earth (1988), two collections of fiction, Wild Desire (1990) and The Garden in Which I Walk (2004), and a memoir, Being With Rachel (2002). Since 1993, she has been on the low residency faculty of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
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