$18.99
Lesley Brower’s poems create direct paths to complicated truths, paths that begin and end in the natural world. She celebrates and honors every river and tree, kestrel and crow, firefly and mosquito. She recognizes the past, present, and future of every living thing, including us. In the clearest language, her poems acknowledge that we all share a “single, feathered heartbeat.”
–Don Boes
Seeing is a creative act; seeing, and then saying what is seen in a clear, lyrical voice is poetry. Lesley Brower sees not only the fine details of rural Kentucky life, but looks for what they may suggest about larger truths, perhaps, even , “the blaze of God through the tatter of corn leaves.” Salt Lick Prayer is a fine beginning for a poet.
–Joe Survant
These poems are a fist that punched me in the gut, but they’re also a long-fingered hand that brought me a glass of water and an ibuprofen. […] Lesley Brower’s poems “fluster my grip / on this earth, set me skyward / in a sun-flushed whirl.”
–Tom C. Hunley
Salt Lick Prayer
by Lesley Brower
$18.99, Full-length, paper
978-1-63534-080-8
2017
Lesley Brower is a native Kentuckian. She earned her BA from Western Kentucky University and her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She and her husband live in Southern Illinois, where she gardens, cooks, works for a local church, and teaches English at John A. Logan College. Salt Lick Prayer is her first book.
jacob erin-cilberto –
A review of Salt Lick Prayer, a collection of poems by Lesley Brower
It is almost “Some Small Thievery” on the part of this reader to get to see “the mud-dull back of a snapping turtle/ easing through clay at the river’s edge” through the vibrantly visual words of Lesley Brower as she takes on a field trip through the Kentucky hills in her scenic, and delightfully metaphorical book of poems titled Salt Lick Prayer.
From awakenings of nature through choruses in a country church on Sundays, we experience both the landscape itself, and the feel of growing up in this southern Midwest state. Her words are strong enough “to carry past something/ other than flotsam/of overhanging trees” with overhanging themes of closeness and importance of family, to love of heritage and just being who we are.
We observe the crows “a murder of them” with more focus and clarity as they “hustle/ of slate wing and hooked toes,” as we quickly become hooked on the words that “rain-churn” through these poems. And as readers, we become (with this poet) “a single, feathered heartbeat.”
In one poem she speaks of the mosquitoes that “start in on us” and how “we slap at our ankles, scratch the quick welts/ until they bleed.” And as we continue to read through this book, we see a supple heart that bleeds for her family, her fellow man and for that “shuddering space/ between what is taken/ and what is left behind.” Lesley’s empathy extends to those who are subjects of her words and her affections, and that is quite an extended family.
She expresses the hope that the reader will “press your ear to the ground/ and hear the marble-roll growl of something ancient giving birth” showing the value she places on those who came before her and the heritage surrounding them, and also how nature keeps its cycle alive by constant re-birth.
In “When It Comes Down to It” she explicates the strength constantly shown by country women, who all at once look pretty but have the knuckles to prove they work as hard and as long as any man. And how on Sundays at the church, “When it comes down to it, I’m part of the folk who’ve seen the blaze of God.”
Very impressive how this poet gives us a collage of topics in the same breath. There is a spiritual undertone to many of her writes, and yet a plain old country shuffle to her beautiful word dances. She shows us soft and tough within the lines as we get the “Twitch of wind of flame, then a cottonmouth hiss of heat in the dark/ our barn gone bright with that timeless hunger,” the one she gives us to read and re-read her words, to crawl up into that hayloft and become privy to secrets of the life of a country poet who says “Lord, often I desire to be as shameless as a cow, particularly the unabashed manner/ in which they gyrate their tongues/ lolling the slick muscle past ryegrass/ and millet-stained teeth in ardent bray.”
She says “Dare I speak of the desire to press/ my own bud-mantled tongue to all manner/ of things discouraged? Once, I flattened / my mouth against the rusted pane/ of a screen door until the hatched weave/bequeathed its coppery marinade.”
There is a tasty marinade in this book of poetry and it would behoove the reader to use our eyes as tongues and traverse the morsels delivered to us in Lesley Brower’s wonderful first book of poetry.
jacob erin-cilberto (author of Rewrites and Second Chances)