Scrap Bones: Poems (Volume 4)

by Collier Brown

Collier Brown’s Scrap Bones reads like a post-pandemic epilogue to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” No angels or flying horses here, just panic disorders, email fatigue, and the spiritual dead end of a 23-and-Me test kit. And yet, resilient are the muses in this collection—the bees, the starlings, the dragonflies—skimming over the wastes.

The Sabine Series in Literature

...

from “Orion, Break”
they’re sleeping in their homes,
they’re waking from their beds,
they’re at their desks
and on a call. They’re unimpressed.
That’s not your fault.
Nor your concern. I’m tired
of images, of lines and dots and codes.
When I step into the dark,
I only want the novas
and the nowheres in between,
and if I’m very lucky—
if I’ve beaten all the odds—
just one, naïve fluoresce
of the insect who
is its own hello/goodbye.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

Published June 13, 2023

About the author

Collier Brown is a poet, photography critic, and literary scholar. He is the founding editor of Od Review and editor of both 21st Editions (Cape Cod) and Edition Galerie Vevais (Germany). Brown’s essays on photography have appeared in more than twenty books, including Eyemazing: The New Collectible Art Photography (Thames & Hudson) and Beth Moon’s Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (Abbeville Press). Eye, Thus Far, Unplucked, Brown’s latest poetry collection, is out now with Stephen F. Austin University Press.

Reviews

[Chuck H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection from Collier Brown establishes him as a kind of poet laureate of modernity, and places our current zeitgeist in a historical context. There's a poem or poems for you in here.