Flying Through A Hole In The Storm

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press 2021

A keenly observant collection of poems on disaster, aging, and apocalypse.

Golda Meir once said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there’s nothing you can do.” The poems in Fleda Brown’s brave collection, her thirteenth, take readers on a journey through the fury of this storm. There are plenty of tragedies to weather here, both personal and universal: the death of a father, a child’s terminal cancer, the extinction of bees, and environmental degradation.

Brown’s poems are wise, honest, and deeply observant meditations on contemporary science, physics, family, politics, and aging. With tributes to visionary artists, including Frida Kahlo, Pablo Picasso, and Grandma Moses, as well as to life’s terrors, sadnesses, and joys, these works are beautiful dispatches from a renowned poet who sees the shadows lengthening and imagines what they might look like from the other side.

“[This is] a hybrid book, a combination of poetry and prose. It proves that at high levels of composition there is little distinction between the two. A superb accomplishment.” – Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at Stockton University.

“It is easy to forget that only the rarest of people have something interesting to say about themselves. But Fleda Brown proves a mesmerizing exception—anything she cares to share is manna for our deepest needs.” –Foreword Reviews