Whether turning her attention to the power of red
lipstick, the space-shuttle explosions that coincide
with the speaker's two divorces, begging like
Billie Holiday ("hush now, don't explain"), or
burning actual bridges in Arkansas, Antoinette Brim
discovers love's two-headed tenacity: it both promises
to do us wonders and threatens to do us in. In "Blues
Haiku" the poet writes: "down so low, don't think / I
can get up... " But in this book so mortally full of
learning to let go, she repeatedly rises to the
occasion, looking for whatever still might help her
accomplish the vital release--even if it's not quite "as
easy as leaving /
Little
Rock on the next sliver of dawn." Brim's
debut
collection of poems is a book of substance and
sustenance.
David Clewell,
author of The Low End of
Higher
Things
In Psalm of the Sunflower, poet Antoinette
Brim explores the painful reality of divorce as a
foundation for self-discovery. Through exquisitely
crafted poetry, filled with layered language and
meaning,
Brim unravels the breaking and mending of
heart and spirit through a metaphoric engagement of
nature, the
Little
Rock landscape,
collective memory and song. Revelatory
semantics skim just below the surface of these poems
whose visionary narrative-arc mirrors the sunflower
drawn to light as Brim explores a new morning of
possibility through language.
