To Your Scattered Bodies Go

by Brian Brett

Born to be an outsider because of a rare genetic disorder, Kallmann syndrome, Brian Brett lived an androgynous childhood of abuse and sexual harassment. In his teen years he slid into the waterfall of poetry, becoming an auto-didactic polymath, writing—as he says—“sideways” to the academic poetry of his times. Though raised into manhood in the back of a bootlegger’s truck, Brett, as the hometown outsider, took on the outside world, delving into ancient alchemical mysteries, the poètes maudit of Jean-Arthur Rimbaud’s days, the rhythms of various tribal cultures, the talking blues, the rhapsodic illuminations of jazz, all the while gathering field notes from nights around camp fires.  To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a collection of poems written over the past twenty years, a collection that speaks with a child’s open directness, in fierce ironies, a sometimes bent logic, a justifiable fear of his body, of loves won and lost, and the hallelujahs of a man standing on the lip of the grave. Brett has a unique spirit, a unique musical voice.

139 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2022

About the author

Brian Brett, former chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada and a journalist for four decades, is best known as a poet, memoir writer, and fictionist. He is the author of twelve books including the poetry collection, “The Colour Of Bones In A Stream,” and the novel, “Coyote: A Mystery.” His memoir, “Uproar’s Your Only Music,” was a Globe and Mail’s Book Of The Year selection by Ronald Wright: “The most exciting Canadian book I’ve read all year. ” His best-seller, “Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life,” won numerous prizes, including the Writers’ Trust annual award for best Canadian non-fiction book. His new poems: “To Your Scattered Bodies Go” won the CBC poetry prize in 2011. A collection of poems and prose poems about an endangered watershed in the near-arctic, “The Wind River Variations” has just been released. He is currently completing the third of a trilogy of memoirs, “Tuco And The Scattershot World: A Life With Birds.”

Reviews

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed some of the poems here about nature, love and the poet's childhood memories. The poet's interest in different cultures of the americas really shows. In one poem encouraging other poets he says the lines you write may captivate someone like an aztec priest ripping out their heart or something along those lines. Even when these cultures are not explicitly mentioned, they form a sort of palimpsest. Some of the more physical poems about love didn't really appeal much to me, even though they were well-written they were just not my thing. Same goes for the poems that lament what modernity does to us/our planet. I just find that to be an overused theme in social justice oriented poems that wasn't done in a particularly unique way here.