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Book Reviews
Review by Ed Zahniser Whiskey in the Garden of Eden by Sarah Browning marks this poet-activist and poetry activist's first book of poems. It is politics writ personal—so, more effective. Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal wrote that "the economy of the future will be to make things more beautiful.” Sarah Browning implies that the economy of the future will be to make life more fruitful for mothers and children—and other sentient beings. That would be: without war. Imagine. Her political poems emanate from the honest barricade that is the self speaking truth to power. The late Washington, D.C., poet Michelle Murray wrote a line waking me up as a late-adolescent in the 1960s, a line about war, simply: "history and my history." Wasn't there just history, and that's that? This was revelation—even if only of my schoolboy dumbnitude. Official history isn't what happened? Now we wonder, "Who owns history?" The Smithsonian Institution or its Enola Gay exhibit critics? The Civil War "noble cause" contingent? Holocaust deniers? But Poetry, Michelle Murray . . . they were prophetic—Sarah Browning is right in there writing alternative history. From "Another March, January 2003:" We will find the perfect Hand-made sign: THE ONLY BUSH I TRUST IS MY OWN . . . as the papier mache coffins go by the angels of death, the skull masks, Which is not to pigeonhole Browning as war-protest poet. She is poet, as is Cardenal and as Murray was. Walking out, the crowded city air was icy and rotting hot from "I Was Separated from My Breasts in a Large City." I want to be eight, the easy flail / before the apple / before the knowledge of my tree trunk body. ("Heads Flung Back, Racing on the Lawn") Erotic knowledge does come: Barely You are away and I barely remember you barely recall our love-makings going blind in the kitchen as you press me up against the wall. I try to feel your cock, really feel it— can the mind alert the body with memory, with love?—press against me. It's been two weeks, today. It will be six more Mondays like this sitting in the growing sunshine spring waking me to myself. I'll have to do it without you, this year: celebrate the bulbs pushing through the reticulated mass of fall leaves and twigs, my weightiness. There— I swear I felt it. Praise for Turning 40 Praise the middle-aged back-hoe man digging the alley behind my house. He smiled at me when I went out to hang my sheets. Praise hair and its new locations, rough heels, the pouchy place above the crease of my elbow. Praise the man with his groceries who stared at my legs, praise the dress that showed the legs. Praise the breasts that hang that way since the baby, praise the straps and wires that hold them up. Praise wine that reminds the body, chocolate at the back of the throat. Praise your hand pressed between my thighs. Praise all the places it wants to travel. Browning's poems of the body and the family underscore the truth and vitality of her poems of the body politic and their persistent protest. (Review by Ed Zahniser, poetry editor of the Good News Paper in Shepherdstown, W.Va., and author of several books of poetry, most recently Mall-hopping with the Great I Am, Somondoco Press, 2006, and the e-chapbook, Ransacking Desire for a Seed of Contemplation (www.languageandculture.net), 2007.) About the Author Sarah Browning is coeditor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2003) and coordinates the group of that name. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute, providing creative writing workshops to low-income women and youth, and a fundraiser for The Fund for Women Artists—playwrights and filmmakers. Her poems are widely published in journals such as The New York Quarterly, The Literary Review, and Eclipse. She received the Quadrangle Poetry Award in 2001 and took third place in the Larry Neal Awards for Poetry in 2003. She is the recipient of a Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities Individual Artist Grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She heads the upcoming Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness (www.SplitThisRock.org). The festival will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, films, parties, walking tours, and activism She lives in Washington DC with her husband and son.  |
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