The Missing Lover

by Summer Brenner, Lewis Warsh (Illustrator)

Summer Brenner is a gracious writer. She makes me perfectly comfortable and glad to be travelling beside her in tales that explore love’s festival of meaning. Then she startles me with the surprise of intimacy, the sudden access to depths I couldn’t foresee. I didn’t know I could know her women in love this way or this well—the questing of physical life, the candor of spirit. And sometimes her prose flies up in a rush of poetry.
Robert Glück, author of Margery Kempe

Reading Summer Brenner’s novellas is a seductive and disturbing experience, one not to be missed. Her explorations of the vagaries of love are illuminated by a powerfully vivid generosity—generosity meaning not only sympathy and understanding but a willingness to recognize passion as a source of both folly and inspiration, cruel stupidity and ecstatic enlightenment, frustration, disappointment, and anger as well as irresistible sexual joy. There’s absolutely no doubt that she knows what she’s talking about. Harry Mathews The women in Summer Brenner’s world grow wiser by defying expectations, both the world’s and their own. Her characters are tonic and poetic, weaving melancholy with healing. We are in the hands of a first-rate storyteller. Andrei Codrescu

254 pages, Paperback

Published January 16, 2023

About the author

Summer Brenner was raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She moved north, east, and eventually west, taking up residence in Berkeley where she has been a long-time resident.

Her writing has appeared in dozens of anthologies and literary magazines. Performances of her work include "The Flood," a poem for four voices at Links Hall, Chicago; The Missing Lover, a one-act play, with readings directed by Peter Glazer; and the poetry and musical extravaganza, Arundo (with Summer Brenner, Andy Dinsmoor, Bob Ernst, Hal Hughes, and GP Skratz). She has given scores of readings in the United States, France, and Japan. Grant awards include the California Arts Council, the Creative Work Fund, and in partnership with Community Works, The Christensen Fund and Lesher Foundation.

Currently, she works on literacy projects in Richmond, California. She is author of more than ten books of poetry and fiction.

Anthologies include:
American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late; American Poets Say Good-Bye to the 20th Century; Cradle and All; Deep Down: New Sensual Writing by Women; The Erotic Impulse; Rising Tides: 20th Century Women Poets; The Stiffest of the Corpse; The Unmade Bed; Wreckage of Reason: Anthology of XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century, et al.