Lite Year

by Tess Brown-Lavoie

This is an entertaining book of epistolary poems in prose which light up a young farmer's year through external and internal signs and cues, reaching out and reaching in, the lightness of being, loving, and dreaming. The poems don’t really tell any stories but they narrate an enchanting and intellectually stimulating subjectivity. The subject of the poems is love, growth, illness, wellness, detachment and attachment as told by an embodied disembodied prime mover, a daughter, sister, lover, farmer. There is an addressee, which longed-for presence provides soil for the embedding of contact. A journal of the times of year in which a body grows quiet, then active, then reflective, then expressive, with all the contemporary appliances, texts, and devices. There is a violence to the transmission of effluence and effluvia; a sweetness to the extrusion of affect.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published November 13, 2018

Reviews

[julia chang]

heart gone woowoo over descriptions of the intersection @ cranston and westminster, sort of like when somebody you know has achieved relatively more fame than you and you want to brag about (knowing) them. reluctant epistolary dispatches between an untended friendship? ex relationship? land/farm writing without glorifying the 'naturally occurring', which is corny and untrue. took my time rereading so i could savor all of its dusty, sweaty crevices :)

[William Ward Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

LITE YEAR is a book of poetry written for the interior self, chronicling the author's life as an urban farmer and writer. Imagine if Emily Dickinson in her 20s was a farmer and had access to the internet, and you have a frame of reference for this delightful book that offers a close look inside one year, along with all that ebbs and flows within it.

[Quinn Monette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some exceptional turns of phrase, but its political motion is ultimately constrained by genre & form.