A Brave Crescendo by Abbie Copeland

Abbie Copeland’s A Brave Crescendo presents a fresh poetic voice – strong and thrilling in its courage and accomplishment.  Charting the dangerous territory of sexual abuse, family, and fraught relationships, these poems are sharply observant and brilliantly controlled.  A sense of danger pervades the collection, and the poems bristle with psychological complexity – a torrent of emotions rendered with complete mastery.  At the end, one cannot help but read it again, so compelling are its power, urgency, and grace.

–Helen Fremont, author of After Long Silence

Narratives of exposure–physical fracturing and fraying/frayed emotional landmines–take on a romanticism in A Brave Crescendo, as does remembrance, in particular the honorific ache for the virility of women and matriarchs, the cycle of children-ing, and the made-avant garde, gently, and nakedly, by Copeland, of (an) experience of woman development. Familia is commemorated, a no-judgment zone where lineage is agent. Embodied memory welcomes an effortless reader: “while you folded towels / like bread dough / and sang tiny lullabies / to sandwiches;” later claiming, “and sometimes I’m blonde / and other times I’m multi. / I can make distance come to me / by moving my hands over my / hip bones…”

–Dina Paulson-McEwen, Parts of love (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Founder, Aqua Editing