Ausable Press: The Brass Girl Brouhaha

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | SELECTED POEMS | VIEW CART

Winner of the 2004 Kate Tufts Award! In wild, zany, often hilarious language, this poet writes about what it’s like to be a woman, a mother, a wife, an ex-wife, and a poet in 21^st century America. Whether exuberant, secret-spilling, grousing, reveling, or wailing, Blevins poems are highly entertaining, passionate, and determined to say what’s true.

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

"Sex is in here. Mortality too, with all the incremental wounds to self-love and dignity that sex and mortality entail. And motherhood, square root of all the rest, is here, so stripped of every piety it steams. And spooling through this gorgeous, brassy brouhaha, the freshest poetic line that America has produced in thirty years…. I don't know where she got it except from the gods and from plenty of god-inspired hard work, but Adrian Blevins' perfect gift for timing is magic on the page…. [She] has harnessed the vernacular sentence—the one great under used resource in our national repository—and put it through paces that make the language young again. Edgy, double-timing, favoring the feint and swerve, she plays the momentums of slang and syntax, run-on and compression for all they're worth. And in expert hands like these, they're worth nearly everything: these poems remind us how smart the language can be on our behalf. We've needed this book; it comes not a minute too soon. Blevins' spirited demotic is a thinking machine." —Linda Gregerson

"The close of Adrian Blevin's poem "Generally Speaking" speaks with a music, a heartbreak, and a passion that you will find throughout her latest collection, The Brass Girl Brouhaha. The long lines and elegant craftsmanship of these poems allow Blevins to delve into the music and pain of her own history, creating compassion and surprise: "Are you the bird you know you are and is rage your middle / name?" asks the poem "The Interrogative Sentence." It is this kind of eloquence that gives the poems in this collection their brass and steam…. The voice of these poems is deeply feminine, perhaps because they are willing to say what so many women are unable to speak. With audacity and honesty, Blevins takes on the complex issues that often confront women: their relationships with parents and lovers, motherhood, teaching, and the task of balancing an artistic life with raising a family…. Blevins speaks a certain truth about life's brutality and beauty. She tells the story of one woman with such dexterity and honesty that it becomes a more universal story which must be told." —Marita O'Neill

"This is the American voice that I've been waiting for: robust, complex, passionate, sassy, crucified, and amused. Adrian Blevins tells some stories about women's lives that we haven't heard before, and tells them with a big, rich unrestrained stylistic vocabulary. Poetry lovers, this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang. When you open this book, you should hear the ballistic explosion of a cork jumping out of a bottle, or the starter's gun, which signals that the wild race has begun."
—Tony Hoagland

“These are poems that shine and hum, that dazzle and crow.” —William Woolfit, New Pages

“This is NOT your mother’s poetry—not unless your mother was someone out of the movie ”The Ice Storm.” It’s also not the kind of dirt-dense poetry favored by the literary pinkie-waving set with all those beautiful-sounding words that seem to lead nowhere…. At last we have a poet out here in the real world living and grieving and mothering, and then getting it all down—as few people do—just exactly like it is.” —Beth Macy, The Roanoke Times