Top 40

by Brandon Brown

Poetry. California Interest. Like the wavering foliage which inspired William Wordsworth's autobiographical epic, "America's Top 40 Countdown" is the catchy Beatrice of Brandon Brown's new book. Writing through the Top 40 pop songs on the chart of September 14, 2013, Brown's poems track the life of a song as it resounds through an organism. An organism who bathes, reads, writes, likes, fights, loves, hates, and fucks seems human; the soundtrack never stops.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2014

Reviews

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very clever, and I loved some of the connections he made between the songs and things happening in his own life, or between these seemingly inconsequential pop hits and much larger themes in culture, mythology, literature, etc. There were many times when he achieved a particularly brilliant insight or pairing of words that elevated the entire book and its concept, and which I reread because they were so striking in their sound, their sense, or both.

Also, I appreciate that he didn't uniformly disdain the songs because they were popular, and that he was honest enough to say that he had listened to some of them over and over, by choice. One thing that added a lot of depth was how he brought in experiences from his past, listening to the Top 40 with Casey Kasem as a kid.

There were a few verbal tics that I found very distracting: 1) overuse of commas in cases where a semicolon or other punctuation would have improved the clarity, 2) the recurring phrase "But I dunno" -- it's so frequent, it becomes annoying, 3) the tendency to use a lot of literary theory/criticism terms -- some readers will love this, I'm sure, but I didn't.

Also, there's one small/big inaccuracy: What he was listening to is called American Top 40, not "America's Top 40" as he calls it. Not s huge deal except that if it is the central focus of your book, I think you should make sure to get it right.

Overall, though, I did enjoy this a lot. It was a great idea for a poetry book, and he executed it well.

[Berit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incandescently, crazily, cacklingly good. I will probably read anything Brandon Brown writes from here on out and love it. This collection of poems meditates on a series of songs that were in the Top 40 in 2013, and it is a collection in a true sense, interweaving signal tropes including "my boozy and druggy vacation," us-ness, the revolution, and Ragnarok throughout, one poem referencing another's conclusions or discontents. I found the multiplanar quality of this writing so surprising and so successful: we are in the song, we are remembering a line from Wordsworth, we are at a reading or at a party with Brown's little cast of real-life characters (Alli, Sara, David, etc.), we are in a mythological future narrated by Snorri Sturleson. To quote Kevin Killian, this book made me wanna roll my windows down and cruise.