Description
Poetry. IN THE LAURELS, CAUGHT is a collection of lighthearted, deep-rooted poems written around the Appalachian region of North Carolina in Madison County. An adventurous, intellectually restless native, Lee Ann Brown writes out of attachment but with the slant of a transplanted outsider. She investigates elements of local language, musicality, material culture, and landscape, using collage, found poetry, and oral history and anecdote.
A Daylily's blossom
only lasts one day
Binnorie O Binorie O
My grandmother showed me
how to have my say
O the glory O the glory
Now every time I see a faded drooping bud
I deadhead it like she did so the rest can live on
The story O the story
Author Bio
Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan in 1963 and was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University, where she earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.
She is the author of IN THE LAURELS, CAUGHT (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein.
Collaborative books and projects include Bagatelles for Cornell with Karen Randall (Propolis Press, 2012), Sop Doll! A Jack Tale Noh with Tony Torn (Mermaid Tenement Press, 2009), NASCENT TOOLBOX with Laynie Browne (The Owl Press, 2004), The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, a song cycle based on rewritten Appalachian ballads, hymns and childhood songs, Dia/Gnostic, with Anne Slacik (2001) and THE 3:15 EXPERIMENT with Bernadette Mayer, Danika Dinsmore and Jen Hofer (The Owl Press, 2001).
Lee Ann Brown has produced multimedia poetry events and performances through the Poetry Project, the Segue Foundation, Torn Page, and The French Broad Institute (of Time & the River) and has shown her films at Anthology Film Archives, the Collective for Living Cinema and other venues. She performs her work widely and her poetry has been translated into French, Swedish, Slovenian, and Serbian. Editorial projects include Far from the Centers of Ambition, a tribute anthology for Black Mountain College (Lorimer Press, 2013) and guest editorships with journals Open City and West Coast Line. In 1989, Brown founded the award-winning Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women's and "intersextual" poetry.
Brown has held poetry fellowships with the New York Foundation for the Arts, Teachers & Writers Collaborative,
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA