What Flesh Inherits, Volume 14

“J. Scott Brownlee’s What Flesh Inherits is as much about exile and departure as it is arrival, belonging, and homecoming. I’m drawn to the mix of tenderness and tact Brownlee summons as he writes this final love letter to a hometown whose demons split time as angels. Coaches fracture teenage boys’ bodies, fathers transform into white-tail bucks, and the dead rise again as catfish in these surreal poems. As Brownlee unleashes the rural gods of air, earth, fire, and water, he reminds us that “joy has a sadness in it we are able to claim if we hear its music.“—Dorianne Laux, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems

“There’s an elegiac tone to this fine collection, which rides on its deep feeling and resonant imagery. The barns dismantle. The deer and men wound each other. A mother collapses in her son’s arms after a failed surgery. But the April wildflowers also bloom after spring rain in a Hill Country landscape that reminds me of James Wright’s rural Ohio and the California farmlands of Larry Levis. Brownlee’s Llano is a place where redemption is always on the menu—where the local Dairy Queen hands out free Blizzards to the deserving and the undeserving alike without charging for them.“—Joseph Millar, author of Shine

J. Scott Brownlee is a poet from Llano, Texas. His first full-length collection, Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize, named a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and received the 2016 Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

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