A Handmade Museum

by Brenda Coultas

Brenda Coultas’s prose poems take us on a well-documented tour from the Bowery, pre-1900 and post-9/11, to southern Indiana, pre-automobile and post-genetic engineering. Her poems are sculptures pieced together from bits of memory and a montage of American detritus. This cinematic and wildly original collection asks the big questions as it documents our private selves, playing out our lives in public. Before becoming a poet, Brenda Coultas was a farmer, a carny, a taffy maker, a park ranger, a waitress in a disco ballroom, and the second woman welder in Firestone Steel’s history. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including Conjunctions, Epoch, Fence , and Open City . She lives one block from the Bowery in New York City.

Genres: Poetry

110 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

Reviews

[juch · Rating 5 out of 5]

read for class, will read more closely later! loved the realism of the first section (super candid, super un-hand-wringing) mixed w the fantasticalness of the later ones. i loved the size of the book haha - holding this big thing in my hands. the ugly font. coultas seems like a cool white lady who gives no fucks. i too am the smallest child in the human museum

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this book were just comprised of The Bowery Project I would give it 5 stars, because I loved that. I loved the methods, the trash, the lists, the people, the interviews, the documentation, the performances (such as "Tenement Tour" and "Bowery Wishes"). Brilliant. I didn't love the other sections nearly as much.

[Dennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quickly one of my favorites. Challenges and reinvents the cliche of "writing from observation" in a fresh way, recording the Bowery as witness sans confessionalism. This is edgy and has heart. You should get it!

[Gary McDowell]

Prose poems?!

[Amira Hanafi · Rating 5 out of 5]

trash, i think, is one of the finer topics for poems

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A- Beautiful language; story of NY and Bowery Bums

[Renee Jaspers · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was truly awful. Not my cup of tea.

[Masha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coultas's book of poems about found objects in her Bowery neighborhood - and much more - is imagistic, funny, unpretentious.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

another person's treasure, I think. Amazing read.