The Four Seasons

by Brandon Brown

Poetry. California Studies. Brandon Brown's new full-length book THE FOUR SEASONS is a contemporary study of the seasons from the Bay Area in California, a place where weather exists but whose meaning is perverse.

Written as a kind of poet's daybook between May Day 2015 and May Day 2016, THE FOUR SEASONS tracks an impossibly weird and utterly ordinary year through memoir, anecdote, aphorism, lyric, and joke. Of course other things the poet has a birthday, cooks lavish Thanksgiving dinner with his friends, visits the land of the dead. The poet is in love, the poet watches the Super bowl, gets high, talks shit, Prince dies. This page-turner is obsessed with one time (a year) but casts forward and back through seasons gone and imminent. Weather won't tell you what time of year it is in Oakland--but THE FOUR SEASONS is a bellwether of what reeks and sings in our world today.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2018

Reviews

[Meg]

Not For Me in the Least. but i’m happy for you guys i guess

[Roger Butts · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no spoilers because it is a stream of conscience prose poem that is impossible to describe. But it is clear the writer is super smart and well read and a stoner and lifts up a world of easy portability between this world and the world of the dead and the chance encounter and the world of Easter and it is all just a wild reflection on life and love and so on. I can't review it because I am not sure entirely what just happened.
But I'm giving it four stars because if you are interested in poetry that will just land in your imaginal space, you should try it.

[Bo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. Midway through, I might have written it was small enough and required the right amount of attention as to be a perfect page turner while indulging in long baths. My admiration increased at the clever threads of subjects winding through the seasons. Points off for heaviness/boring bits mostly involving varietals of weed and cum.

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book interrogates what makes life poetic. So poetry. Like Baudelaire, if he wasn't a whiny asshole.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmological

[Abi · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating little pantoum of a book