Breathing In Breathing Out

Anhinga Press 2002

“Fleda Brown has such a wide ranging intelligence, such a large and quirky variety of subjects, and such facility with language that you come away from her poems amazed at the emotional impact under the entertaining and colloquial surfaces. This is a fine and original book.”

—Linda Pastan

“Brown deftly explores the otherness that language both gives and inflicts on us. “One day Adam said ‘Adam,’/ and found out he was standing/ across the field from everything/ else,” she tells us. Nothing is changed and everything is, once words separate us from nature. Fleda Brown’s great skill with that alienating and communicating tool, language, is to show us how dazzlingly strange the familiar world is.”

—Andrew Hudgins

“Fleda Brown brings brilliance and craft to the inexplicable narratives of lived memory. In poem after poem her omnivorous intelligence, driven to understand, stands poised beautifully on the moment between breaths.”

—Marilyn Nelson