215 ratings | 22 reviews | avg rating:4.57

Brett Lars Underwood’s Followers (16)

Brett’s Bookshelves

to-read (369)
currently-reading (3)
read (283)
did-not-finish (0)

Brett’s Friends (340)

Stefan-Iulian Tesoi

520 books | 2,072 friends

James Benger

1,554 books | 86 friends

Jazzy

430 books | 227 friends

Jason

1,952 books | 226 friends

Jonathan Beck

699 books | 74 friends

Steve

957 books | 194 friends

Josh

425 books | 22 friends

Joseph D. Newcomer

39 books | 1,338 friends

More friends…

Brett Lars Underwood

Goodreads Author

Born

in The United States

Genre

Poetry, Humor and Comedy, Psychology

Member Since

March 2008

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/brettlarsunderwood

edit data

Both MUSH and MUSHARONA are available at Subterranean Books and Dunaway Books. Also, you can contact me to work out a meeting or Venmo or PayPal arrangement______________

“For years, Brett Underwood’s poetry has demonstrated a peculiarly strident fuck-you-fuck-off aesthetic, the kind one tends to associate with the post-hippy, anti-glam, acid punk revival sensibility. With Musharona, Underwood adds a contemplative element to the mix, with references to hope, prayer, and a particular Sunday afternoon when quiet rain evokes all the world’s heaviness. Death and sex are on his mind. I consumed the book in a sitting, and I advise others to do the same.”
Aaron Belz, http://www.belz.net/

_____________
"There's something of Rimbaud in Brett Underwood' Both MUSH and MUSHARONA are available at Subterranean Books and Dunaway Books. Also, you can contact me to work out a meeting or Venmo or PayPal arrangement______________

“For years, Brett Underwood’s poetry has demonstrated a peculiarly strident fuck-you-fuck-off aesthetic, the kind one tends to associate with the post-hippy, anti-glam, acid punk revival sensibility. With Musharona, Underwood adds a contemplative element to the mix, with references to hope, prayer, and a particular Sunday afternoon when quiet rain evokes all the world’s heaviness. Death and sex are on his mind. I consumed the book in a sitting, and I advise others to do the same.”
Aaron Belz, http://www.belz.net/

_____________
"There's something of Rimbaud in Brett Underwood's poetic language. I've enjoyed hearing him read his work, for which his urgent declamatory method is broken from time to time by . . . searching pauses? Just like his French forebear, Underwood's writing is directed toward “trouver une langue,” searching for a language to fit his exuberance and rage.

"Mush is his most accomplished publication to date; twenty-one lyrics registering a wide emotional range and attentiveness to interior rhythms that indicate to turners of pages that these words are better spoken out loud. Two poems near the beginning, "Work is a Four-Letter Word" and "Word is a Four-Letter Word," share near same titles but embark on very different uses of language. The first utilizes stacked short lines whose meter evokes the hauntedness of cubicle life, as in "I can't. I have to work in the morning./ I better not. I should work./ You missed work./ Why weren't you at work?/ I'm looking for work./ You better get to work./ Men at Work, of course. (Ha, ha …)/ Pistol in mouth." "Word . . ." employs elaborate word games, anagrams—methods of writing employed by Christian Bök and Kurt Schwitters, to whom the poem is dedicated—and unexpectedly apt neologisms, as here: "over some forletter word,/ Then when therwith is oversom forlet terword./ Then the we hen there withis oh versom for let/ Err woe heard."

"Perhaps the strongest poem in Mush is "Sometimes I Work in a Grandiose Castle," a succession of riffs on passersby from one kind of outsiderness or another. Such lines as "My feet turn to glass/ as the clouds/ on which I was wondering/ shoot needles of sleet into my mind/" are both urgent and world weary, a Rimbaud-ian inference that brought "A Season in Hell" to mind. Here's Rimbaud: "I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star . . . And I dance." Rimbaud was embittered and done with poetry before he was twenty. Underwood continues to fight off such despair. His is a poetry of continuance after all."

Buzz Spector, http://www.buzzspector.com/
______________________
"Like Dylan in Boots of Spanish Leather, Brett Underwood is a story and a story teller. He is a myth-maker showing us over and over how to lean into sadness and EXIST. Reading MUSHARONA, I am sure Brett Lars Underwood wrote it as the account of a life lived and simultaneously wrote it only for me." Paul Koniecki, poet, raconteur, roust-a-bout
_--------------------------
------On MUSH:
""If you're interested in confronting an inheritor of subtle surrealism and magical Beat writing you need to read Mush by Brett Lars Underwood. He's a great St Louis fixture and his writing possesses that rare quality: it's fun. Whether he's channeling Dylan Thomas or Cummings with his original wordplay you can count on the fact that the poems will be discursive and bawdy. Buy this one!"
Matthew Scott Freeman, author of Trying to Take a Nap (KATTYWAMPUS PRESS, 2017)

::::::::::::::::::::::::On MUSHARONA::::::::::::
"So many local ghosts haunt Brett's poetry that I can't think of St. Louis without thinking of him. He's our true Beat, revved up for 2021, and he's got that lyrical style we've come to count on. Settle in and hear what he has to say."
...more

Combine Editions
Brett Lars Underwood’s books

Average rating: 3.67 · 3 ratings · 1 review · 1 distinct work

Mush

3.67 avg rating — 3 ratings

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

Brett is Currently Reading

Brett Underwood is currently reading

Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America

by Jesse Walker

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Jan 03, 2025 01:45PM

Brett Underwood is currently reading

Wars I Have Seen

by Gertrude Stein

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Oct 21, 2023 01:51PM

Brett Underwood is currently reading

E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised

by E.E. Cummings

bookshelves: currently-reading

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Aug 19, 2023 01:54PM

rss
Brett’s Recent Updates

Brett Underwood started reading Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America by Jesse Walker	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jan 03, 2025 01:45PM · like

More of Brett's books…

Brett’s Quotes

“A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”
― Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

tags: destiny, lazy, soul

184 likes

“you told me once
about how they used
to build whole city states
out of poems

how everything you see here
is made out of
the bones of dreams

how having a stiff
drink with lorca meant
you had to write
everything down right away

lately the words just
won’t come”
― John Dorsey

tags: poetry

6 likes

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

535 likes

“There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either.”
― Robert Graves

tags: robert-graves

263 likes

“The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television

17 likes

More of Brett’s quotes…