Rust or Go Missing

Poetry. The poems in Lily Brown's RUST OR GO MISSING exist in the liminal space between the literal and the imagined, the rational and the irrational, the abstract and the representational. They think themselves into being, and in so doing, become not just reflections on lived and imagined experience, but experiences in themselves.

Sometimes tender, sometimes spiral-eyed--but always, as we say, "of a mind"--Lily Brown's sonorous and cerebral poems can fire synapses you never knew you had. If you're careful, RUST OR GO MISSING will keep you on the edge of your head.

Graham FoustLily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, "I think the plastics / and sink them" then "Where is the sand / man hiding the dirt." These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

Rae ArmantroutReading Lily Brown's poems, I feel myself in the presence of an electric consciousness gazing at the temporal rifts and physical folds beneath landscapes and the manifold tensions between bodies. Poetic language here is an instrument of thought or, rather, of a thinking that breathes and is embodied and seeks a new path. By all means, join her along the way.

--Michael Palmer

Lily Brown was born and raised in Massachusetts. She holds degrees from Harvard University and Saint Mary's College of California. She has published poems in such journals as American Letters and Commentary, Colorado Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, FENCE, and Pleiades. Her chapbooks include The Renaissance Sheet (Octopus Books), Old with You (Kitchen Press), and Museum Armor (Doublecross Press). She lives in Athens, where she is a PhD student at the University of Georgia.