Description
During the pandemic, Bill Brown started reading friends’ poems that he loved. He chose a quote from each poem and wrote a tribute poem as a response. That is how this book, After Reading, got its title. Brown selected poems from 33 poets, most of whom he knows and loves as friends.
Praise for After Reading
In this wise and generous collection, poet Bill Brown shows us the power of a poetic community. “Peopled” with towhees, otters and “late red throated hummingbirds” encountered during pandemic social distancing, but peopled too with the remarkable poets and poems who sustain the author, as he now sustains us, his readers, with this “gift… carried with prayer, // sometimes joy, and often / in blue heron dreams.”
—Pauletta Hansel, Weatherford Award Winner, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Heartbreak Tree
If poems could talk with each other, Bill Brown’s After Reading might be what they’d speak. And who’s to say they don’t converse? For that’s what poems and poets do, build community, share coffee, dream up new ways to love and old ways to reconcile love’s loss. Read and converse.
—Jim Minick, author of Without Warning
There is so much gifted in this book. It is a feast of giving, receiving, gifting on. It is, indeed, a kind of communal breathing, a chronicle of inspiration. I love the energies crackling—the tender, rigorous presence, the attunement to place, particulars, stillness, being—between the original poems’ titles/lines and Bill Brown’s wise and felt, celebratory responses to them. After Reading is both a Bill Brown collection and a kind of anthology, personal and communal; most of all, it’s a love letter to friends, to reading, to life.
—Thorpe Moeckel, author of Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw and According to Sand
