Brazos

by Justin Carter

94 pages, Paperback

Published August 6, 2024

Reviews

[Jacey Updegrove · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who grew up in Brazoria County, this collection of poems feels like coming home. I felt so nostalgic for my teens while reading these poems. I recommend these poems to anyone, but especially to people who grew up in Brazoria County.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Justin Carter’s debut collection of poetry feels like taking an (un)scenic road trip through yesteryear. Trekking through a desolate landscape of Middle of Nowhere, America, his childhood memories and narrative poems reminded me of my own upbringing in the bored cornfields of Indiana. The run-ins with the law, the parties in abandoned barns, the late nights driving through the nothingness. This book does an incredible job of capturing a time and place. It’s not necessarily nostalgic but it is reflective and vivid as hell, as if you’re right there with him, grabbing the can of spray paint and staying up late.

[Jack Bullion · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn’t help but read this as a modern companion piece to John Graves’s Goodbye to a River: A Narrative, about a canoe trip taken down an undammed, untamed Brazos in the late 1950s. But where Graves honed in on a disappearing country and its way of life, Justin Carter examines what Graves called “the spreading imposition” of his hometown on the banks of the same reshaped, muddy-armed river. The poems in Brazos all feel like an act of rummaging - Carter fishes memories out of the depths and holds those memories up to the light, examining every facet, concentrating on the flaws, the complications, the contradictions.