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Andrea Brady. Liberties: The White Wish, The City Adorned Like a Bride.

A rutted and taxed sublime is prone throughout these great challenges, soaring as they do and crashing between erotic panic and gazes strictly levelled. Brady lights up the labour of political commitment under an assault of intimate lyric strobes and epical tenors; these are fierce unmastered love poems, truly a heart brazen broken and smashing through either release and either finish.

1999. 52 pp. OUT OF PRINT

 
'This is a book to stare at like folds in fabric (liberty's gown) until the complications of its figures make themselves insistently present.' -Nada Gordon in readme 1.

'Andrea Brady stands as tall as you want while she rips your pea-brain (mine, anyway) into smithereens, flowing, protoliterate incursions into inchoate bliss and something opposite -- isn't this what we all need now?' -Jack Kimball on the Boston Alternative Poetry Conference, 1999

 
  A few feathers cling to the corner of the door. We have shut
this paradise, tugging gently on its golden reeds under a canopy
of possible snow until they gave way and laid
lengthways across the spongy ground. By the monikers of God
moving restlessly, relentlessly up over the broken horizon towards us
we take a few pills, shift, basing our claims on the laxity of our wills
as true criteria for noticing that laxity, a grim city life, a desire
to reform in the spattered rooms and come up here again.
Darkened hues scatter their flattery like an articulated universal poverty
into the damp corners of our basement place, and yet we have loved
each other, been moved, and driven all night. On a row of molten hooks
we arrayed these few notes, hope, deepened intentions brought on
by an adolescence of our social desire. Still and tossing stillness
into the cool wasteward fund of air I can, still, call this number up,
and beg the rights before an intransigent audience of the divine.
I can, still, nonetheless, lying deep in it, look upward and float
steadily with you on this shiftless barge. I do not know how to be
a better person. Each version cracks like a glass flooded with hot water,
dispersing its heat into the taking mass. And yet we have
done this, and will do this in the verge where God's finger no longer
picks on our petty fragrant ornaments. Oh leave off fighting with me,
spread this angel over the perfumed ground.

 

 

Andrea Brady was born in Philadelphia, USA in 1974.  She studied at Columbia and Cambridge, and is now Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Her book English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century was published by Palgrave in 2006.  As co-publisher of Barque she edited 100 Days.  Vacation of a Lifetime was published by Salt in 2001. A page describing her work is available at the British Electronic Poetry Centre, as well as some of her reports on recent readings.

Articles

  • ‘For Immediate Delivery: Blogs and the Sublime’ in Put About: An Anthology on Independent Publishing, ed. Maria Fusco and Ian Hunt (London: Bookworks, 2004)

  • ‘The Other Poet: John Wieners, Frank O‘Hara, and Charles Olson‘ in Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing beyond the New York School (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2004)

  • ‘Grief Work in a War Economy’, Radical Philosophy 114 (July/Aug. 2002)

  • ‘Zero Longitude: Notes on Kevin Nolan’s Elegiac Centres’, The Paper 5 (Oct. 2002): 27-35

  • Entries for all US and UK living poets, Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (CUP, 2004)

Reviews

  • ‘Seeing Read: George Oppen, New Collected Poems’, Poetry Review 94.1 (Spring 2004)

  • ‘Walking and Standing Still in Suffolk: R. F. Langley, More or Less‘, Poetry Review 93.1 (Spring 2003): 67-73.

  • ‘Out of This World: Peter Robinson, Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen’, Poetry Review 92.4 (Winter 2002): 96-99.

  • ‘The Middle Distance: Lorine Niedecker, Collected Poems’, Poetry Review 92.3 (Autumn 2002): 87-91.

  • ‘A Review of Left Under a Cloud by Stephen Rodefer’, Jacket 15
  • ‘Brief Notes on Reverses by John Wilkinson', Jacket 9

Poetry

 

also available: Vacation of a Lifetime(Cambridge and Applecross, Australia: Salt, 2001).

144 pp.  ISBN 1-876857-16-1.
GB£7.95, US$12.95, CAD $16.95, AUD $19.95. 
Order from Salt Publishing, Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.

"Freedom to move through different gears allows the recycling of different registers to overlap without straining the juxtaposition of local word games and harsh political realities. The fire power generated by torpedoes of excess is just what these poems need and theres plenty of transgression. If some of the poems relate to news stories whose urgency has faded in the light of subsequent events, theres still something new about the sense of a political testament, a record of what it means to face up to the problems of the present. This book is not for the faint-hearted, and it takes a while to find ways into the brasher surfaces, but it is a rare example of a book of poems where the struggle between political radicalism and poetic form is worth sharing. Despite its title, Vacation of a Lifetime is no holiday." --Keith Elliot, Terrible Work

"Effecting an off-site sifting of virulently sexualized, life-style-propping policies that kill people, Andrea Brady takes readers on a Vacation of a Lifetime, her first book of poems. An American poet now teaching in London, Brady works past First World lies and representations, taking idioms and ideology and warping them back from outside: “bullets/ bought by staff at the heart shaped cafe.” Throughout, the book’s deep engagement with lyric as valid and viable cultural expression, despite its imperial history in English, evinces a belief in imagining other truths: “If you can reach/ to pull your presents toward you, I am there/ at the breaking point, floodlit with you and different/ as the world is now: I found/ for you a brighter hemisphere." --Publishers Weekly

 

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