Domestic Karma by Andrea Carter Brown

Fires and fronts move through the landscape in Domestic Karma, where moths, butterflies, spiders, snakes and a shrike’s impaled prey all find their place. Skiffs set out, guided by the moon and stars with Brown at the helm and laundry for sails. Anniversaries circle like spokes of a wheel from bardo to bardo. Venus pops above the clouds. Brown is a seer. Brown is curious.Is it a finch or a waxwing? Her tools are history, geography, the past, and a birder’s wicked eye. Nothing need shield us. Lucky was. Lucky is. Lucky. Listen.

–Scott Hightower, Author of Self-evident

In Domestic Karma, Andrea Carter Brown mines with deft formal restraint the rich material of her verse, which ranges from the trauma of New York on 9/11, to the quiet celebration of her husband’s remission from cancer, and—in a contrapuntal reckoning at the collection’s heart, “August 6th”—a meditation on the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the internment of Americans of Japanese origin during WWII. Brown writes a taut, sonically intricate poetry of exquisite observation, profound conscience, and humane intelligence whose “insistent song” just might redeem us.

–Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

Birds in the trees, winds in our dreams, ghosts in the words, birds as words: there’s so much lovely transmogrification in the fine new poems of Andrea Carter Brown, we find ourselves often on the borders of things, where this is indeed that, and gloriously so. But nothing’s too pretty for these pretty poems, given the history for which we are all accountable—the Holocaust and 9/11 figure prominently here, too—even as the poet wisely knows that there’s love to be found all over, lots and lots of careless love. How wonderful to be in the presence of these elegant artworks, singing along with this terrific writer to the tunes in our blood, discomfited and convivial, scared and delighted.

–Alan Michael Parker