The Brass Girl Brouhaha

by Adrian Blevins

Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for a first book of poetry. In wild, zany, often hilarious language, this poet writes about what it’s like to be a woman, a mother, a wife, an ex-wife and a poet in 21st century America. Linda Gregerson has commented that Blevins writes “the freshest poetic line that America has produced in 30 years.”

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

When she hits, she really hits. But many of the poems, just when I get into her riffing, she closes down the poem–that is, too early. And often, I felt like just when the poem was going to hit its note she sidesteps and goes elsewhere. But she still is fantastic.

[Rebecca]

Adrian is possibly the most interesting person I have ever met. She was one of the fellows in my workshop at Sewanee this past summer, and one of the few people with whom I was able to grumble about the lack of aesthetic range at that conference, without feeling like I had to explain that didn't mean I wasn't having a marvelous time. Not only that, but she is one of the best readers of poetry I have ever known - astute, articulate, always with an eye to all the possibilities a poem seems to hold. She's read everything, memorized most of it, and I think all these things show in the poems, which have the long conversational lines of a beat poem, but the language has both more levity and more gravity than the term "conversational" suggests. And the poems themselves are a record of a life and a series of emotional responses to it that are as complex and immediate and unapologetic as the poems themselves.

[Nikki · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of this book was pretty good, but perhaps only because I read it while getting a pedicure. After that, her self-obsessed ramblings about motherhood and being a woman and the world and blah blah blah. Kinda boring.

[Christopher Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blevins makes the long-lined American yawp we know from Whitman and Ginsberg her own here, turning out punchy poems of autobiographical messiness.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5